Microsoft has confirmed that its services are fully restored after a day-long global outage that disrupted operations across more than 70 countries. The outage, which affected products like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, began on Thursday and lasted nearly 24 hours before services started recovering on Friday afternoon. Microsoft attributed the issue to a network capacity upgrade, clarifying that it was not caused by a cyber-attack or AI agent.
The disruption impacted over 430 million users worldwide, including businesses, government services, and individuals. In the UK, cyber minister Liz Lloyd reported limited effects on critical services like 999 calls and transport. However, in Canada, the national rail network and hospitals faced email issues, while in the US, legislative work in the House of Representatives was delayed. The outage also affected the COP31 climate summit in Turkey and smaller businesses like a winery in South Africa, where operations were brought to a standstill.
Microsoft first acknowledged the issue on Thursday evening and worked through the night to restore services. By Friday afternoon, partial recovery was reported in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. The company emphasized that the gradual restoration was necessary to ensure stability. A full post-incident report will be released after a review.
Experts highlighted the outage as a reminder of the heavy reliance on big tech providers. Rob Demain of e2e-assure noted the dependence on a handful of companies, while Matt Saunders of Adaptavist pointed out the challenges in mitigating such risks. Organizations were advised to plan for working without these tools in case of future incidents.