Microsoft says services fully restored after hourslong global outage

WASHINGTON, Nov 14, (AP): Microsoft said Saturday that services were fully restored after a massive outage that lasted for hours. "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 that Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, were interrupted.

Downdetector, an online tracker, said it received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories. The outage affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places. Governments including those of Japan, Singapore and Australia reported that the hourslong episode had impacted some of their operations.

Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. Problems started appearing around midday Thursday in the US. The Redmond, Washington-based company apologized on Friday for the disruptions and said the outage was "not related to cyber” or artificial intelligence agents. It said the incident "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced” following a recent network change.

The disruptions offer the latest example of the cascading problems that can erupt when so many communications and technology platforms depend on the same provider. Some lawmakers outside the US have also argued that 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.” The global reach of the outage was swift. After problems first emerged midday Thursday in the U.S., online tracker Downdetector said it received outage reports from 74 countries and territories within an hour.

The total number of people affected was not clear, but Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services. A series of posts by Microsoft 365 on X suggested its engineers struggled to get the problem under control for some time, drawing teasing from other companies and users alike. But the tech giant has said there is "no indication” that the disruptions were caused by malicious activity, specifically noting Friday that the outage was not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.