Microsoft said on Saturday it had restored services to all affected customers, bringing an end to a major global outage that disrupted businesses and public services across dozens of countries.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the US-based technology giant said in a post on X.
The announcement followed a report on Friday that Microsoft had achieved a “broad recovery” of its Outlook email and other services. The company attributed the disruption to a technical issue, stressing that it was “not related to cyber or AI/agents”.
The outage began on Thursday, affecting Microsoft products in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.
Microsoft initially blamed “elevated load” on its infrastructure for the disruption, which affected its Outlook email service, Teams communication platform and Copilot AI assistant.
New Zealand was among the countries affected. Its foreign ministry issued a notice warning that its ability to receive emails had been disrupted, adding that the problem also affected New Zealand embassies, consulates and representative offices worldwide.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports in the Americas before confirming that the problem appeared to be affecting “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription platform, which includes widely used applications such as Outlook and Teams.
Downdetector recorded a sharp decline in reports of disruptions in Washington and Hong Kong at around 0450 GMT on Saturday. However, thousands of users had reported problems with Teams and Copilot as the outage unfolded.
As the disruption stretched on for hours, Microsoft issued a series of updates on X, outlining its efforts to restore services.
In an update shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT) on Friday, the company said it was “observing limited recovery” as it worked to redirect user traffic away from affected servers.
AFP
