Microsoft said Saturday that services had been fully restored after a massive outage that lasted hours.
“We have completed our efforts to resolve the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions,” the company said in an update on X.
Users reported that Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, were down. Downdetector, an online tracker, said it had received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories.
The breakdown governments and courts concernedhealth services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places. Governments, including those of Japan, Singapore and Australia, indicated that the episode lasting several hours had an impact on some of their operations.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. Problems started to appear around noon Thursday in the USA
The Redmond, Washington-based company apologized Friday for the disruptions and said the outage was “not related to cyber agents” or artificial intelligence agents.
It said the incident “was introduced by an issue during a previous network capacity upgrade that arose” following a recent network change.
These disruptions are the latest example of the cascading problems that can arise when so many people communication and technology platforms depend on the same supplier. Some lawmakers outside the United States have also argued that the outage shows the consequences of overreliance on American technology.
“With no inbound and outbound emails, many office workers feel like they’re experiencing a virtual snow day,” said Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science.
Still, he added, “this issue highlights the dependence we have built on an enterprise’s digital infrastructure and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem.”
The global reach of the outage was rapid. After problems first appeared Thursday at noon In the United States, online tracker Downdetector said it had received outage reports from 74 countries and territories. in an hour.
The total number of people affected is unclear, but Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.
Microsoft rushed to recover services
A series of Microsoft 365 messages on X suggested that its engineers had struggled to get a handle on the problem for some time, teasing drawing other companies and other users. But the tech giant said there was “no indication” that the disruptions were caused by malicious activity, specifically noting Friday that the outage was not linked to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.
Microsoft said a technical issue occurred during an upgrade following “a recent network change”. The company added that it restored services gradually, which took longer.
As Microsoft resolved issues affecting its Exchange Online mailboxes, it previously cited a failure that it said caused a number of its servers to become unexpectedly unavailable during automated checks.
For Outlook, many users reported that they were unable to send or receive emails, or had trouble loading their inbox. These problems have been building up across much of the world through Friday.
Disruptions pile up from court to pharmacy
In Britain, the outage ended a trial in Manchester. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home due to delays that he said illustrated the danger of the court’s reliance on technology.
The UK government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services, but that “robust contingency plans” were in place to minimize disruption.
British police said they were unable to receive reports of online crime and urged people to phone with any urgent inquiries. The outage also affected some law enforcement agencies in the United States. The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado, for example, note that online bail payments have been affected.
Also in Britain, the National Pharmacy Association has warned customers about delays in getting medicines. The outage affected the National Health Service and threatened to prevent doctors from emailing prescriptions to pharmacies.
“Please be patient with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays for some prescriptions,” a spokesperson said.
The governments of Singapore, Japan, Greece and Norway said the outage affected some of their operations, including email communications from some ministries or agencies.
And of course, businesses have been rocked by disruption. Hong Kong businessman Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, said his company could not receive updates from its U.S. customers through Outlook.
Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also experienced disruption.
OpenAI and Anthropic have reported connection issues with Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting the ripple effects of more people using artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
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