Microsoft says 365 services fully restored after global outage
Microsoft said on Saturday that its 365 services were fully restored after a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across more than 70 countries, ruling out a cyberattack.
Restored after more than a day offline
Microsoft said on Saturday that its Microsoft 365 services were fully restored after a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams and its Copilot assistant for more than a day. The company said it had completed work on the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions.
Downdetector, a site that tracks online outages, received reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories, including 74 within the first hour. The outage affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places.
How the outage spread
Problems began appearing around midday on Thursday in the United States, centred on Exchange Online, the cloud email service behind Outlook. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website, and the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions.
Governments in Japan, Singapore and Australia reported problems, a trial in Manchester was halted after the court lost access to its systems, and police in Britain could not receive online crime reports, while Britain's National Health Service faced a risk to prescription emails. OpenAI and Anthropic, two makers of artificial intelligence tools, said they had problems connecting their services with Microsoft 365 tools.
A technical fault, not an attack
Microsoft said the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change, and that it was not related to cyberattacks or artificial intelligence agents. The company apologised on Friday for the disruption.
The outage could cost $7 billion in lost productivity, according to an estimate by Anderson Economic Group, which said about 26 million users on Thursday and 51 million on Friday had their work disrupted. Downdetector showed a peak of 130,000 reports about Outlook outages. Microsoft said it would publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
- 430 millionPeople who use Microsoft 365 apps
- 70Countries and territories reporting outages
- 130,000Peak Downdetector reports about Outlook
- $7 billionEstimated lost productivity, Anderson Economic Group
- 51 millionUsers disrupted on Friday, Anderson estimate
