REDMOND, Washington (The Thursday Times) — Microsoft said on Saturday it had fully restored Outlook, Teams, and its other 365 services after an outage that disrupted governments, hospitals, courts, and businesses in more than 70 countries for about a day, and apologised to its customers.
“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 on its Microsoft 365 status page early on Saturday.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”
A faulty upgrade, not a cyberattack
Microsoft said the problem was introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade and surfaced after a recent network change. It said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or by an artificial intelligence agent, and that it had brought services back gradually to keep them stable.
Users began reporting problems with Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot assistant at about midday on Thursday, US time. By Friday the disruption had reached government offices in Japan, Singapore, and Australia, hospitals and courts in Britain, Canada, and the US, and delegates at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye, who could not reach their email. Services began to recover on Friday afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the first reports.
About 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company.
Paper records and fax machines
In Britain, some hospital staff went back to paper records, and some juries were sent home early. At one Manchester court, staff went looking for a fax machine. Japanese government staff turned to text messages when official email went down, and in India the airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services had been hit.
Experts in Australia warned that the cost to its economy could run into billions of dollars. “A protracted event like this can easily be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for smaller entities,” said Ashwin Pal, a partner at the risk advisory firm RSM Australia.
Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London, said outages of this size were usually “the result of some surprising interaction between systems”. Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow, said the failure showed “the dependence we have built on one company’s digital infrastructure”.
