Microsoft says services fully restored after global outage

Microsoft has said its service is fully restored after a massive outage that caused widespread disruption to governments, businesses and public services around the world.

The tech company said on Saturday morning it had restored service to the remaining customers affected by one of the worst IT failures in years. On its Microsoft 365 status page, the US-based firm said: “We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions.

“Further updates can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.”

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 hours-long episode had affected some of their operations.

In the UK vital public services were hit, with hospital staff resorting to paper records and courtrooms scrambling to locate fax machines.

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.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. Problems started appearing at about midday on Thursday in the US and 6pm in the UK.

The Washington-based company apologised 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” after a recent network change.

The disruptions offer the latest example of the cascading problems that can arise when so many communications and tech platforms depend on the same provider. The outage fuelled concerns in the UK about an over-reliance on a small number of tech companies.

Tim Clement-Jones, a former chair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, said the widespread outages of vital government services were an “I told you so moment” highlighting Britain’s dependence on US tech.

Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow’s school of computing science, said: “This problem serves to emphasise 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 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.