Microsoft says services ‘restored,’ outage over

FAKE NOTICE: Microsoft has warned of a ‘phishing campaign’ in which e-mails told users that messages would be deleted if they did not click on a link

Tech giant Microsoft Corp on Saturday said 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 a social media post.

Microsoft had already reported a “broad recovery” for Outlook e-mail and other services the day before, stating the major disruption was due to a technical issue and “not related to cyber” or artificial intelligence agents.

The Microsoft Outlook logo is displayed on a screen in Warsaw on Friday.

Photo: AFP

The company said the incident “was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced” following a recent network change.

The outage on Thursday swept the globe, taking the company’s products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, the monitoring site Downdetector said.

Microsoft said the stoppage affected its Outlook e-mail service, as well as Microsoft’s Teams communication platform and the company’s Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.

The company on Friday apologized for the disruptions, which affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places.

Microsoft on Saturday warned of an “active phishing campaign” to exploit the disruption, with fake e-mails imitating its service notifications.

The e-mails, detected on Friday, instructed users that messages blocked during the outage would be deleted if the recipient did not click to restore them.