Microsoft says services fully restored after day-long global outage

Microsoft has said its services have been fully restored after a worldwide outage affected several of its tools, causing disruption.

The tech firm said early on Saturday morning that efforts to address the underlying problem had been completed and customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should no longer be affected.

The outage hit more than 70 countries, disrupting everything from business operations to government services and personal users.

Users began reporting they were having trouble accessing Microsoft 365 products on Thursday.

Microsoft first acknowledged users in the Americas were unable to access Exchange Online mailboxes at 17:54 GMT on Thursday, and shortly after warned the disruption was possibly affecting Microsoft 365 globally.

It launched an investigation and engineers began working to restore services, but by 04:36 on Friday Microsoft was reporting only a partial recovery in some parts of the world.

Experts said the event was a stark reminder of how heavily businesses and vital services rely on a small group of big tech providers.

By Friday, the far-reaching issue was affecting institutions from the Japanese government and the Philippines Supreme Court to the Australian spy agency, and trains, hospitals and courts in North America.

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 and that there had been no disruption to the transport network.

Microsoft apologised for the technical issue, which it said was introduced during a network capacity upgrade and was not caused by a cyber-attack or an artificial intelligence agent.

In Canada, however, the national rail network said passengers may not be able to receive email updates about their trips, and hospitals across the country also had issues with emails.

A full post-incident report will be released once Microsoft has completed a review.

Matt Saunders, field chief technology officer at tech consultancy Adaptavist, said it would be challenging to mitigate against a similar problem.