Microsoft restores services after global outage

Users around the world regained access to Microsoft services on Saturday after a major outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications for several hours. Microsoft said all affected services had been restored after engineers resolved the issue behind the widespread disruption. “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 a post on X. The outage affected users in more than 70 countries and territories, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector. Reports of problems began surfacing around midday Thursday in the United States and quickly spread worldwide. Governments, courts, healthcare providers, airlines, banks and businesses were among those affected. Microsoft said the problem stemmed from a technical issue that emerged during a network capacity upgrade following a recent network change. It added that there was no indication the outage was linked to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents. Services were restored gradually, resulting in longer recovery times for some customers and regions, the company said. While the number of people affected remains unclear, Microsoft said earlier this year that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its Microsoft 365 services, underlining the scale of the disruption. The company apologised for the outage on Friday as engineers worked to restore services.