Microsoft 365 Services Fully Restored After Global Outage Disrupts Governments and Businesses

Microsoft has confirmed that its services are fully restored following a major global outage that disrupted governments, businesses, and public services around the world.

The company announced on Saturday morning that service had been restored to the remaining customers affected by one of the most severe IT failures in recent years. On its Microsoft 365 status page, the U.S.-based firm stated: “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, which began on Thursday, affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines, and banks. Authorities in Japan, Singapore, and Australia reported that the hours-long episode disrupted some of their operations.

In the United Kingdom, where NHS England has a five-year agreement to use Microsoft 365, vital public services were affected, with hospital staff reverting to paper records and one union reporting that ambulance services suffered a “serious impact.”

The already backlogged court system was also hit, with juries in some cases sent home early or prisoners not transported to court, while staff at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester scrambled to locate a fax machine.

In the United States, school districts told parents to contact schools by phone or online apps, while staffers at the House of Representatives told Politico they had lost a day of work.

A detention facility in Colorado said it could not process online bond payments to release detainees and instructed anyone needing to post bond for immediate release to do so in person at the jail.

In Australia, many people who rely on Microsoft 365 reported being unable to access their inboxes, including at councils, courts, and schools. The federal police and ASIO, Australia’s national domestic security and intelligence agency, were also affected by the outage.

ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess said the agency’s systems “operate on multiple levels,” adding that they had been affected “on one level, yes, but not completely.”

Across Europe, government agencies in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France reported problems, with one French municipality instructing citizens to use the phone instead of emailing.

In Japan, government email services became unavailable and staff resorted to text messaging. Shipping firm Sagawa Express was unable to accept some online reservations, while Taisho, a major pharmaceutical company, said it was handling orders by phone.

Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, and Taiwanese security firms, life insurers, and investment trust companies told Reuters that fund management services had been disrupted.

Users reported that Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, were interrupted. Downdetector, an online outage tracker, said it received reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories.

Approximately 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to Microsoft. Problems began around midday on Thursday in the U.S. and at 6 p.m. in the UK.

The Washington-based company apologized on Friday for the disruptions and said the outage was “not related to cyber” activity 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 illustrate the cascading problems that can arise when multiple communications and technology platforms depend on the same provider. The outage has intensified concerns in the UK about overreliance on a small number of tech companies.

Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London, told the Guardian that an outage of this size usually results from “some surprising interaction between systems. Each of the systems is normally quite well understood, but interactions between them are complex and frequently the cause of large outages like this.”

“It is very hard to build a complex system without there being some risk of failure,” he added.

Tim Clement-Jones, former chair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, described the widespread outages of vital government services as an “I-told-you-so moment” highlighting Britain’s dependence on U.S. 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 total number of people affected was not clear, but Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.

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