Microsoft outage disrupts 70 countries as millions face email and service failures
- Global technology giant apologises as Global Microsoft 365 outage hits businesses, hospitals and government services; begins broad service recovery after nearly 24-hour global outage
- Outage exposes worldwide dependence on cloud-based technology as services gradually recover
Microsoft has apologised to customers worldwide after a major technical outage disrupted its products, including Outlook and Teams, affecting businesses, government institutions and individual users in more than 70 countries.
The technology giant said services were showing broad signs of recovery by Friday afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the problems began, but warned that it could not yet provide a timeline for a complete restoration. The disruption affected products used by more than 430 million people worldwide.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” a Microsoft spokesperson said, adding that the company took seriously the responsibility associated with the trust customers placed in its services.
Microsoft described the recovery as encouraging, reporting broader improvements in North America, sustained progress across much of Europe and positive recovery signals in the Asia-Pacific region. It said services were being restored gradually because of the scale of the problem and the need to ensure stability once systems returned to operation.
The company attributed the outage to a technical issue introduced during a network capacity upgrade, ruling out a cyberattack or problems involving artificial intelligence agents. Microsoft said engineers were investigating the cause and would publish a full post-incident report after completing their review.
The disruption began on Thursday, when users reported difficulties accessing Microsoft 365 services. Its impact spread across government agencies, transport networks, hospitals, courts and businesses. In Japan and the Philippines, government institutions were affected, while Australia’s intelligence agency also experienced disruption.
In Britain, parts of the National Health Service, including general practitioners and hospitals, were affected, along with some schools and police forces. However, the country’s cyber minister, Liz Lloyd, said the impact on critical frontline services, including emergency 999 calls, was limited, with no disruption to the transport network.
Canada’s national rail network warned that passengers might not receive email updates about their journeys, while hospitals also reported email-related problems. In the United States, the House of Representatives experienced a setback to a full day of legislative work because of its reliance on Outlook. Singapore also acknowledged that some government systems had been affected.
The outage extended to businesses and individuals. In South Africa, winemaker Peter Pentz said the disruption had brought his business to a standstill, affecting communications with export customers and halting critical production work that depended on Microsoft’s systems.
In Britain, a house purchase scheduled after an eight-month wait was delayed because the parties involved could not communicate with other agencies. The incident also affected officials and advisers attending the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, who experienced difficulties accessing Outlook.
Technology experts said the outage highlighted the growing dependence of businesses and essential services on a small number of major technology providers.
“The global Microsoft outage is a stark reminder of how heavily we rely on a handful of big tech providers,” said Rob Demain, chief executive of cybersecurity firm e2e-assure.
Matt Saunders, field chief technology officer at technology consultancy Adaptavist, said preventing similar disruptions would be challenging for organisations because of their dependence on services such as Microsoft.
He said businesses needed to develop plans for operating without essential digital tools when such incidents occur, adding that traditional disaster recovery strategies based on using alternative services were difficult to implement in practice.
