Microsoft says services restored after outage disrupted users in more than 70 countries

Microsoft said early Saturday that its Microsoft 365 services were back to normal after a lengthy outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant for users worldwide, according to PBS NewsHour, which carried an Associated Press report, and BBC News.

In a post on X, the company said it had resolved the root cause and returned service to the last customers and regions still affected, PBS reported.

The trouble began around midday Thursday in the U.S. The BBC reported that Microsoft first acknowledged at 17:54 GMT on Thursday that Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas were inaccessible, then cautioned that the problem could be global. Recovery started Friday afternoon UK time, close to a full day after the first reports, according to the BBC.

Within roughly an hour of the initial problems, users in 74 countries and territories had flagged outages to the tracking site Downdetector, PBS reported. Microsoft states that over 430 million people use its 365 apps, and in January it reported more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions, according to PBS.

Both outlets reported that Microsoft apologized and attributed the failure to a problem that arose during a network capacity upgrade, ruling out a cyberattack or AI agents. The company said it brought services back in stages so they would stay stable, which slowed the process. The BBC said Microsoft plans to publish a full post-incident report once its review is finished.

PBS said governments in Japan, Singapore, Australia, Greece and Norway reported that some operations were hit. According to the BBC, the Philippines Supreme Court and Australia's spy agency were also affected, and staff in the U.S. House of Representatives told Politico they lost a day of legislative work.

In Britain, PBS reported, a Manchester judge dismissed jurors for the day, police were unable to take crime reports online, and the National Pharmacy Association warned that prescriptions could be delayed because of disruption at the National Health Service. The BBC reported that UK cyber minister Liz Lloyd described the effect on critical frontline services, including 999 calls, as limited.

The BBC also cited problems at Canada's national rail operator and hospitals, as well as among delegates at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey. PBS reported disruption at some Hong Kong banks and said OpenAI and Anthropic had difficulty connecting to Microsoft 365 tools.

Experts quoted by both outlets said the incident highlighted reliance on a few large technology firms. "The global Microsoft outage is a stark reminder of how heavily we rely on a handful of big tech providers," Rob Demain, chief executive of cybersecurity firm e2e-assure, told the BBC.

Jeremy Singer, a computing science professor at the University of Glasgow, told the AP, as carried by PBS, that the episode may lead people to ask "whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem."

Compiled by True News from reporting by PBS NewsHour and BBC News. Each outlet's original story is linked below.

Originally published by True News: https://truenews.bagleyenterprises.net/stories/1067