American multinational technology conglomerate – Microsoft – has confirmed that its services have been fully restored following a worldwide outage that disrupted access to several of its products, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, across more than 70 countries.
The technology company announced early Saturday that it had completed work to resolve the underlying technical problem, assuring customers that the affected services were operating normally again.
The outage, which began on Thursday, affected businesses, government institutions and individual users, with more than 430 million people worldwide relying on the products involved.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to a problem introduced during a “network capacity upgrade”. The company also ruled out a cyber-attack or an artificial intelligence agent as the cause and apologised to customers for the incident.
The widespread disruption exposed the dependence of businesses and essential public services on a handful of major technology providers, with experts describing the incident as a “stark reminder” of the risks associated with that reliance.
Several countries reported significant disruptions as the technical problems persisted for almost 24 hours before services began recovering on Friday afternoon UK time.
Peter Pentz, a winemaker in South Africa, said the outage had brought virtually every aspect of his business to a “standstill”.
He explained that communication relating to his winery’s exports had been disrupted, while essential production activities were suspended because the Cape West Coast-based business depended on Microsoft’s systems for some of its daily operations.
The outage also affected individuals with important personal transactions to complete.
Georgia, from Staffordshire in England, said she had been preparing to complete her first house purchase after waiting eight months for the process to reach its final stage. However, the Microsoft disruption threatened to delay the transaction.
“The solicitor mentioned there may be a delay due to not being able to contact other agencies,” she said.
“We’re not the only one completing today – there are hundreds of houses and for them to ring everyone in time is unfeasible.”
- BBC