Overview
- The outage began on Thursday at about 16:00 GMT and stopped access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services in roughly 70–74 countries.
- Microsoft announced full restoration by Saturday and said it found no signs of a cyberattack, blaming a fault tied to a prior network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a configuration change.
- Many public institutions and businesses switched to manual workarounds during the disruption, with New Zealand pausing visa processing and Unity Health Toronto declaring a 'gray code' emergency.
- The firm is still clearing large backlogs of queued email and sync tasks, a process that extended the recovery and raised costs for affected organizations.
- The outage has renewed debate in Europe and elsewhere about dependence on a few cloud providers, with industry groups warning of high economic risk and calls for stronger redundancy, contracts and regulation.