Overview
- A multi‑hour outage that began Thursday evening cut access to Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot for users in more than 70 countries and left many organisations unable to send mail or run scheduled meetings.
- Microsoft told customers the root cause was an internal network‑capacity upgrade that overloaded a process used to build secure connections, and the firm reported consumer services were back by about 17:10 Central European time on Friday while enterprise recovery work continued.
- The disruption forced hospitals, transport and government offices to use paper records, backup systems or phones, with the UK NHS, New Zealand visa services and Australian students among those reporting problems.
- German officials and industry groups urged immediate steps to build redundancy and diversify providers, noting that the federal administration avoided major outages by relying on on‑premise servers and local systems.
- Demand for European and open‑source alternatives surged, with ZenDiS’s OpenDesk reporting more than 200,000 licences sold and plans to expand partner hosting and pilot cloud offers ahead of regular operations in early 2027; independent modelling also estimated multi‑billion‑dollar economic exposure from the outage.