Microsoft Restores Services After Global Outage

Microsoft said on Saturday that services across Teams, Outlook and its other products had fully recovered, ending a global outage that crippled online communications for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours.

The company posted on X that it had completed its efforts to address the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions. Microsoft said the outage specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and scheduling hub, leaving unconnected applications operational.

Problems started appearing around midday Thursday in the U.S., and reports on Downdetector climbed from about 1725 GMT that day, according to Ookla, the tracker's parent company. Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking at nearly 20,000 a minute, more than 1,500 times normal levels. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, the company says.

The disruption hit government agencies from Australia and Japan to the United States and Singapore, delayed trading firms and some corporate earnings, and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags. The UK's National Health Service said local services turned to alternate systems or paper records, and the Metropolitan Police said reporting some crimes online was affected while response to calls was not. Organizations that host Microsoft services on their own servers rather than in the cloud were somewhat spared, according to Reuters.

Microsoft said the incident was not related to cyber activity or artificial intelligence, and was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. The company apologized on Friday, saying it was deeply sorry for the disruption.

The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year; the company also faced a Microsoft 365 outage in January and an Azure outage last month. Analyst Josh Gilbert of eToro said recurring reliability problems could give IT departments reason to reconsider concentrating more business with one provider, though steep switching costs make moving difficult.

American AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic also faced issues with Microsoft connectors that were later resolved. Workhorse Group (WKHS) rescheduled its quarterly results to November 16 and Switzerland's Richemont briefly delayed its first-half results announcement on Friday.

Microsoft (MSFT) shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday and have gained roughly 8% so far this year. Mario De Cicco of Morningstar DBRS estimated global insured losses from the incident at $300 million to $500 million, well below the $400 million to $1.5 billion toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage.