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. More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide.
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.
Experts said the event was a “stark reminder” of how heavily businesses and vital services rely on a small group of big tech providers.
Users began reporting they were having trouble accessing Microsoft 365 products on Thursday.
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.
Services were beginning to recover by Friday afternoon UK time, nearly 24 hours after the issues first began to emerge.
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.
By 13:32, the tech giant said there had been “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 due to the scale of the problem and to help ensure services remained stable once they were up and running again.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
“We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”
A full post-incident report will be released once Microsoft has completed a review.
Experts said that while workers may have been happy to not have email access for a working day, the incident showed the dependence many organisations have on these cloud-based services.
“The global Microsoft outage is a stark reminder of how heavily we rely on a handful of big tech providers,” said Rob Demain, chief executive of cybersecurity firm e2e-assure.
Matt Saunders, field chief technology officer at tech consultancy Adaptavist, said it would be challenging to mitigate against a similar problem.
“Classic IT disaster planning strategies suggest using a second service for resilience, but in practice, it’s almost impossible for a business to function without tools such as Microsoft,” he said.
“In the wake of this outage, organisations must have a plan in place for how to work without such tools, for when incidents like this occur.”
