Tech giant Microsoft said on Saturday that it has “restored service” to customers, effectively drawing a close to a massive outage that caused chaos and disrupted public services and business around the world.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the US-based company said in an X post.
Microsoft had already reported a “broad recovery” for Outlook email and other services the day before, stating the major disruption was due to a technical issue and “not related to cyber or AI/agents.”
The outage swept the globe on Thursday, taking the company’s products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the monitoring site Downdetector.
Microsoft had attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure.
It said the stoppage affected its Outlook email service, as well as Microsoft’s Teams communication platform and the company’s Copilot AI assistant.
One of the impacted countries was New Zealand, where the foreign ministry sent a notice saying its “ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage. This also impacts all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world.”
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports “in the Americas,” but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
Downdetector, which tracks online outages, showed a sharp decline around 0450 GMT in users’ reports of disruptions in Washington and Hong Kong.
Thousands of users also reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.
As the outage dragged on for hours, Microsoft posted a series of updates on X, detailing continued but unsuccessful efforts to restore full service.
In one update shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT), Microsoft said it was “observing limited recovery” as it sought to route user traffic away from affected servers.
AFP
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