Microsoft fully restores its Microsoft 365 services after more than 24 hours of global outage

Microsoft announced this Saturday that Microsoft 365 services have fully recovered, ending an outage that affected millions of users in at least 74 countries for more than 24 hours. The company confirmed that Outlook, Teams, Copilot and the other affected tools are now functioning normally, and that its status page indicates that "all products are up and running."

The outage began on Thursday with issues accessing mailboxes in Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas and quickly spread to Microsoft 365 connectivity across all regions. Users reported difficulties sending and receiving emails, loading inboxes and connecting to Teams, Copilot, OneDrive and Azure. The peak number of incidents exceeded 130,000 reports in Outlook alone, according to Downdetector.

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Technical cause and the company's apology

Microsoft attributed the outage to a technical issue that arose during a prior network capacity update and manifested following a recent change. The company repeatedly ruled out any connection to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence systems. In a statement released on X, the company formally apologized: "We deeply regret the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners."

Due to the high volume of traffic, service restoration was carried out gradually, verifying stability at each stage. Microsoft also extended the timeout for emails to 48 hours to protect delayed messages and stated that it will publish a comprehensive post-incident report once the internal review is complete.

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Impact on governments and businesses

The outage had significant consequences for both the public and private sectors. Japan reported a "major impact" on its systems; Australia estimated losses in the billions of dollars; and in the United Kingdom, organizations such as the NHS and law enforcement agencies were affected. Some organizations resorted to alternative systems, including fax machines, while they waited for service to return to normal.

The company stated that no configuration changes were necessary on customers' devices or tenant environments and recommended that IT administrators monitor updates through the Microsoft 365 admin center (incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821) or the official @MSFT365Status account on X.

Although services have now been restored, Microsoft is conducting an extended review of the infrastructure and the backlog of emails accumulated during the outage to confirm that no further action is required. The company has not yet specified the release date for the detailed report on the incident.