Microsoft has apologised to customers and business partners following a global outage that disrupted its services in 74 countries and territories, saying it had achieved a broad recovery as efforts continued to restore full operations.
The technology company said the disruption, which began on Thursday, affected several of its products, including Outlook and Microsoft 365, causing interruptions to businesses, public institutions and essential services across different parts of the world.
In a statement posted on X on Friday, Microsoft expressed regret over the incident, assuring users that its services were gradually returning to normal.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” the company said.
“We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI/agents.”
Microsoft also ruled out a cyberattack or malicious artificial intelligence activity as the cause of the disruption, attributing it instead to a technical problem involving its network infrastructure.
According to outage monitoring platform Downdetector, the disruption affected users in 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The outage had significant consequences for several sectors, particularly healthcare, aviation, education and financial services.
In the United Kingdom, the disruption affected the National Health Service, with staff handling emergency calls reportedly unable to access the usual system for referring patients.
Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union, said the incident had a “serious impact” on the country’s healthcare system, adding that emergency call handlers could not refer patient details through the normal process, resulting in a substantial backlog.
Airlines in India also reported difficulties communicating with customers as their email support systems were affected.
IndiGo and Akasa Air warned passengers through separate posts on X that their email support services were disrupted and that they might not receive customer messages.
Immigration New Zealand equally announced that it had suspended the processing of all visa applications because of the outage.
In Japan, the country’s Economy, Trade and Industry Minister, Ryosei Akazawa, warned that the disruption could have a “significant impact”, given the widespread use of Microsoft’s products.
The incident also exposed the dependence of businesses on Microsoft’s digital services, particularly its Outlook email platform and Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.
Yashmit Sharma, a 26-year-old auditor in London’s financial district, said the failure of Copilot and Outlook was particularly frustrating.
“I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working,” he said. “I think this was the main bummer. And Outlook as well, of course.”
Sheera, a 40-year-old risk manager at a mid-sized bank who declined to disclose her surname, said businesses needed to prepare better for unexpected technology disruptions.
“I think we need to be a little bit more careful,” she said.
“Anything can happen: you wake up, and Outlook is not working, and it’s the main communication we use for our global team.”
Similarly, the Australian Computer Society called for a national review of the risks associated with dependence on technology infrastructure.
Its Chief Executive Officer, Prins Ralston, warned that smaller businesses could struggle to maintain operations when essential digital platforms become unavailable.
“We need to know the systems that keep this country running won’t simply fall over without notice,” Ralston said, according to the ACS publication, Information Age.
Microsoft had initially blamed the disruption on “elevated load” on its infrastructure.
However, in an update on Friday, the company explained that the problem originated from an earlier network capacity upgrade and became apparent following a subsequent network change.
“The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change,” it said.
Microsoft added that it had resolved the underlying problem and was working to restore services to the remaining affected customers and regions.
Reports of service disruptions on Downdetector had started declining by 0900 GMT on Friday.
The company initially said it was investigating reports of outages in the Americas before confirming that the disruption affected Microsoft 365 connectivity for users across all regions.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription platform, which provides access to applications and services, including Outlook and Teams.
