Overview
- Services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot went offline in a multi‑hour disruption that began Thursday evening and consumer access was restored Friday at 17:10 MEZ with full service reported by Microsoft Saturday at 07:09 MEZ.
- Microsoft said engineers traced the fault to a problem introduced during a prior network‑capacity upgrade that later overloaded a process that establishes secure connections and denied servers the ability to handle requests.
- The outage forced workarounds worldwide, with the UK NHS reverting to paper records, New Zealand pausing visa processing, and many firms reporting disrupted email, calendar and meeting workflows while transport and core infrastructure largely kept running on other systems.
- An independent model from the Anderson Economic Group estimated potential business losses of more than $7 billion and sketched subscription‑fee compensation scenarios, and the company faces urgent calls from politicians and industry groups to boost redundancy and support European or on‑premise alternatives.
- Microsoft has completed initial restorations, will monitor systems closely and has pledged a fuller post‑incident report, while a media claim linking the outage to injuries at Phantasialand is under development and awaits verification.