Microsoft said Saturday morning that its services, including Teams, Outlook and Copilot, have been fully restored after a global outage that disrupted some of its tools.
In a statement on X, the company said work to fix the cause of the outage had been completed and that services were restored for all customers.
Earlier Saturday, Microsoft said services tied to consumer products were fully restored on Friday at 16:10 GMT (5:10 p.m. in Poland), and that restoration of some Microsoft 365 services for businesses was continuing.
The global outage of Microsoft services on Thursday and Friday cut millions of people off from email and office tools. Disruptions were reported at banks, courts and government institutions in 74 countries, among other places.
The problems affected Outlook email, the Teams messaging platform, the Microsoft 365 suite and Copilot’s artificial intelligence tools. More than 430 million people worldwide use Microsoft 365 services, but it is not known how many of them were actually affected by the outage.
The outage disrupted institutions and companies in at least 74 countries.
In the United Kingdom, the disruptions were felt in health care, schools, the railways and Parliament. Ambulance staff handling emergency calls were unable to transmit patient data in the usual way, which caused delays. The Bank of England, the country’s central bank, and other public institutions also reported email problems.
In Japan, the disruptions hampered the work of ministries and other government offices. Communication problems also hit airlines, other carriers and courier companies.
In India, the outage disrupted airline operations, hindering communication and day-to-day handling of operations.
Intelligence services, government institutions and health care facilities in Australia also reported problems. The disruptions made remote medical consultations difficult and affected the work of schools and business communications.
According to the Bloomberg news agency, the disruptions were also felt in financial markets. Some brokers were unable to log in to trading platforms and had to return to communicating by phone. Artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, also noted problems.
In countries such as France and Spain, where public administration uses its own technology solutions, no major problems were reported. The outage did affect the work of some businesses there, however.
In Poland, Deputy Prime Minister and Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski noted on Friday that the outage shows the risk of dependence on global technology providers. He also announced the development of open-source solutions in public administration. Deputy Digital Affairs Minister Dariusz Standerski stressed that Polish administration is operating without disruption thanks to its own electronic document management system, known as EZD.
On Friday evening, Microsoft said the outage that disrupted the company’s software was caused neither by a cyberattack nor by malicious interference from artificial intelligence agents.
The company explained that the cause of the outage, one of the longest in its history and the second this year, was an overload of the process responsible for establishing secure connections on servers. (PAP)
