Microsoft said its services are fully restored after a worldwide outage hit Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The company said the problem was introduced during a network capacity upgrade and was not a cyber-attack. A full post-incident report will follow once its review is complete.
Microsoft said early on Saturday morning that its efforts to address the underlying problem were complete. Customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should no longer be affected, the company said.
The outage hit more than 70 countries, disrupting business operations, government services and personal users. More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide.
What caused the disruption
Microsoft apologised and said the issue was introduced during a network capacity upgrade. It said a cyber-attack or an artificial intelligence agent did not cause it.
The company first acknowledged at 17:54 GMT on Thursday that users in the Americas could not access Exchange Online mailboxes. Shortly after, it warned the disruption was possibly affecting Microsoft 365 globally.
Recovery came gradually
By 04:36 on Friday, Microsoft was reporting only a partial recovery in some parts of the world. By 13:32, it reported broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe and encouraging recovery signals in the Asia Pacific region.
Microsoft said it restored services gradually because of the scale of the problem and to help keep them stable. According to a Microsoft spokesperson: "We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,"
Institutions on several continents affected
By Friday, the issue was affecting institutions from the Japanese government and the Philippines Supreme Court to the Australian spy agency. In the UK, some parts of the NHS were affected, as were some schools and police forces.
UK cyber minister Liz Lloyd said the incident had limited impact on critical frontline services such as 999 calls. In Canada, however, the national rail network said passengers may not be able to receive email updates about their trips.
Matt Saunders, field chief technology officer at Adaptavist, said it would be challenging to mitigate against a similar problem. Microsoft will release a full post-incident report once it completes a review.
Source: BBC News
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