Microsoft Says Services Fully Restored After Global Outage Hit More Than 70 Countries
Microsoft has said its services are fully restored for all customers and regions affected by a massive outage that disrupted governments, businesses and public services around the world.
On its Microsoft 365 status page, the US-based company said on Saturday morning that it had completed its efforts to address the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions. It said further updates could be found under MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
The hours-long outage affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places. The governments of Japan, Singapore and Australia reported that some of their operations were affected.
In the UK, vital public services were hit, with hospital staff resorting to paper records and courtrooms scrambling to locate fax machines.
Users reported that Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot were interrupted. The online tracker Downdetector said it received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories, and that within an hour of the problems first emerging it had reports from 74 countries and territories.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company's website, and Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services. The total number of people affected by the outage was not clear.
Problems started appearing at about midday on Thursday in the US and 6pm in the UK. The Washington-based company apologised on Friday and said the outage was not related to cyber activity or artificial intelligence agents.
Microsoft said the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change.
The disruption is the latest example of the cascading problems that can arise when so many communications and technology platforms depend on the same provider, and it fuelled concerns in the UK about over-reliance on a small number of tech companies.
Tim Clement-Jones, a former chair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, said the widespread outage of vital government services highlighted Britain's dependence on US tech. Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow's school of computing science, said the problem emphasised the dependence built on one company's digital infrastructure and may lead people to question whether more resilience is needed in the IT ecosystem.
