Microsoft ends global outage after hours

Microsoft confirmed on Saturday that all services were fully restored after a multi-hour global outage. The company stated it had completed efforts to fix the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions. Engineers had struggled to regain control of the problem for several hours, posting updates on X as they worked through the recovery process.

The incident began around midday on Thursday in the United States. Problems quickly spread, affecting Microsoft 365 applications including Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant. By Friday, the disruptions had persisted across much of the world, preventing users from sending or receiving emails and loading inboxes.

Microsoft attributed the failure to a technical issue that arose during a network capacity upgrade following a recent network change. The company said the outage was not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents. It noted that a specific failure caused a number of servers to be unexpectedly unavailable during automated checks, which slowed the restoration process.

Downdetector, an online tracking service, recorded outage reports from 74 countries and territories within an hour of the initial U.S. problems. Microsoft noted on its website that more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps. The company has more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to these services, according to data from January.

Government and public service operations felt the impact in several nations. In Britain, Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home in a Manchester trial due to delays caused by the technology failure. The British government said it was working closely with Microsoft and that contingency plans were in place. British police were unable to receive online crime reports and urged the public to use phone lines for urgent matters.

Healthcare and financial sectors also reported issues. The National Pharmacy Association in Britain warned of delays in medication and prescriptions because doctors could not email documents to pharmacies. In the United States, the Arapahoe County sheriff's office in Colorado noted that online bond payments were affected. Banks in Hong Kong and businesses in Singapore, Japan, Greece, and Norway experienced similar disruptions to their operations.

Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, said the event highlighted the dependence many organizations have on a single digital infrastructure provider. He suggested the incident may lead to questions about whether IT ecosystems need more resilience. Other companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools during the disruption.

Microsoft apologized for the disruptions on Friday. The company said it restored services gradually, a process that took longer than initially expected. The outage demonstrated how quickly problems can cascade when numerous platforms rely on the same technology provider for communications and operations.