Microsoft announced on Saturday that a global outage affecting its Microsoft 365 applications—used by businesses and governments worldwide—has concluded after more than 24 hours of disruption.
“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 stated in a post on X.
The outage disrupted Microsoft services including Teams, Outlook, and Copilot, causing communication issues across dozens of countries.
Microsoft said it had no evidence of external interference and attributed the outage to server issues.
The incident ranks among the longest outages in Microsoft’s history and marks the second such disruption this year.
Worldwide Microsoft outage causes widespread disruption
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What Impact Did the Microsoft Outage Have?
According to internet testing and network diagnostics firm Ookla, the outage began at approximately 1725 UTC on Thursday, affecting government agencies and businesses across much of the world.
The disruption prevented users from sending emails and holding online meetings.
Germany was also affected. A spokesperson for the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization said the outage did not significantly impair federal government functions but did substantially disrupt German businesses.
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) experienced severe effects, with staff forced to rely on paper records instead of digital systems.
Outage monitor Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million problem reports worldwide.
The incident underscores the extensive and precarious dependence of governments and businesses on a limited number of major technology providers.
Microsoft’s difficulties are not believed to be connected to the major communications outage affecting U.S. aviation.
