Microsoft says services fully restored after for day-long global outage

Microsoft has said its services have been fully restored after a worldwide outage affected several of its tools, causing disruption.

The tech firm said early on Saturday morning that efforts to address the underlying problem had been completed and customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should no longer be affected.

The outage hit more than 70 countries, disrupting everything from business operations to government services and personal users. More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide.

Microsoft apologised for the technical issue, which it said was introduced during a "network capacity upgrade" and was not caused by a cyber-attack or an artificial intelligence agent.

Experts said the event was a "stark reminder" of how heavily businesses and vital services rely on a small group of big tech providers.

Users began reporting they were having trouble accessing Microsoft 365 products on Thursday.

By Friday, the far-reaching issue was affecting institutions from the Japanese government and the Philippines Supreme Court to the Australian spy agency, and trains, hospitals and courts in North America.

Services were beginning to recover by Friday afternoon UK time, nearly 24 hours after the issues first began to emerge.

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