Microsoft Says Services Fully Restored After Hourslong Global Outage

Microsoft said Saturday that its services were fully restored following a massive global outage that lasted for hours and disrupted work across governments, courts, healthcare systems, businesses, airlines and banks.

"We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the company said in an update on X.

Users reported interruptions to Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot. Online tracker Downdetector said it received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories, and within an hour of the first problems, reports had come in from 74 countries and territories.

The problems began around midday Thursday in the United States and piled up across much of the world into Friday. Many Outlook users said they could not send or receive emails or had trouble loading their inboxes at all. The Redmond, Washington-based company apologized on Friday and said the outage was "not related to cyber" or artificial intelligence agents, adding there was "no indication" of malicious activity.

Microsoft said the incident "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced" following a recent network change. While addressing problems with Exchange Online mailboxes, the company cited a failure that left a number of servers "unexpectedly unavailable" during automated checks. It said services were restored gradually, which took longer, and a series of posts by Microsoft 365 on X suggested engineers struggled to get the situation under control for some time, drawing teasing from other companies and users.

The fallout was widespread. In Britain, the outage halted a trial in Manchester, where Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home over delays he said illustrated the danger of the court's reliance on technology. The British government said it was "working closely" with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services and had "robust contingency plans" in place. British police said they could not receive crime reports online and urged people to phone in urgent requests, while in the United States the sheriff's office in Colorado's Arapahoe County said online bond payments were affected.

Britain's National Pharmacy Association warned customers of delays in getting medication, and the outage hit the National Health Service, threatening to prevent doctors from emailing prescriptions to pharmacies. A spokesperson urged patience, saying waits might be longer than normal and some prescriptions could be delayed. Governments in Japan, Singapore, Australia, Greece and Norway reported that the episode affected some of their operations, including email communications for certain ministries or agencies.

Businesses were also wracked with disruptions. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, said his business could not receive updates from its U.S. customers through Outlook, and some banks in the Asian financial hub saw disruptions as well. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' software.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company's website, and Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services. The total number of people affected by the outage was not clear.

The disruptions are the latest example of the cascading problems that can erupt when many communications and technology platforms depend on the same provider, and some lawmakers outside the United States have argued the outage shows the consequences of overreliance on American tech. "With no emails coming or going, many office workers feel like they are having a virtual snow day," said Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science. Still, he added, "this problem serves to emphasize the dependence we have built on one company's digital infrastructure, and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem."