Sounding the “all clear” after a huge global outage, Microsoft said its consumer products and services had fully recovered as of 1610 GMT on Friday, while Microsoft 365 enterprise services showed sustained recovery.
“We've confirmed that the services across the previously affected environments have fully recovered and the backlog of email messages has been processed, thus this issue is remediated,” the company said in an update on its service status page.
The outage disrupted access to email, Teams and the company’s AI assistant Copilot for millions of users in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Healthcare, airlines and visa processing hit
Healthcare services were disrupted, corporate earnings reports delayed and schools struggled to communicate on Friday as a widespread outage rippled across the globe.
A top UK trade union said the disruptions had a “serious impact” on the country's health care service.
National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls were “unable to refer patient details in the normal way,” creating a massive backlog, said Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union.
As the outage dragged on for hours, airlines in India warned that customer queries may not be getting through.
IndiGo and Akasa Air both said on X that their email support services had been affected and that they may not be able to receive customers' emails.
Immigration New Zealand said the disruption had forced a halt in the processing of all visa applications.
Microsoft traces outage to network upgrade
Microsoft on Friday apologised for the massive outage, saying the collapse was “a technical issue not related to cyber or AI.”
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” it said.
Microsoft traced the problem to an earlier upgrade to expand network capacity.
“We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” the company wrote on X on Thursday.
The US tech company ruled out a cyberattack or any link to its AI systems.
