Microsoft says Outlook and Teams fully restored after daylong global outage

Microsoft said on Saturday that service had been fully restored across Teams, Outlook and its other products, bringing an end to a global outage that disrupted online communications for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours.

"We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the company said in a post on X. Microsoft attributed the incident, which also affected its Copilot AI assistant, to server issues and said it was not aware of any malicious activity, ruling out AI as the cause.

Outlook and Teams rank among the most widely used workplace applications, with hundreds of millions of users. The outage left people unable to carry out basic tasks such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings. According to public statements, it hit government agencies from Australia and Japan to the United States, caused delays at trading firms, kept some companies from publishing earnings and led airlines to warn customers of communication lags. Organizations running Microsoft services on their own servers rather than in the cloud were largely spared.

Microsoft said the disruption specifically affected features tied to Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and scheduling hub, while unconnected applications kept working. Reports of problems began climbing around 1725 GMT on Thursday, according to Ookla, making it one of the longest outages in Microsoft's history and its second service disruption this year.

The scale of the incident underscored the world's reliance on a small group of Big Tech companies that provide both essential software and the cloud infrastructure beneath it. Outage reports spiked as employees started their workdays across Asia and Europe, according to Downdetector's parent company Ookla. Downdetector recorded more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking at nearly 20,000 a minute, over 1,500 times normal levels. "It shows how much of the working day now runs through one provider's email and collaboration tools," said Luke Kehoe, lead industry analyst at Ookla.

The financial fallout may be significant but contained. Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar, said disruptions and losses could generate numerous insurance claims, though he estimated global insured losses at $300 million to $500 million, well below the $400 million to $1.5 billion toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that crashed more than 8 million Windows-based computers. Microsoft shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday and are up roughly 8 percent this year.

The episode adds to a growing list of incidents. Microsoft suffered a 365 services outage in January and another in October last year, and last month its Azure cloud platform went down, hitting productivity software and industries worldwide. "The bigger worry is that this is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro. "If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands." Still, some analysts doubt such events drive customers to rivals, given the steep cost of replacing tools embedded deeply in daily operations.

In Britain, a government spokesperson said it was working with Microsoft after the outage hit organizations including the NHS and London's Metropolitan Police. The police force said lack of access to emails and other services affected its ability to take some crime reports online, though call response was unaffected, while the NHS said local services switched to alternate measures such as other IT systems or paper records.

Business fallout spread widely. European exchange operator Euronext reported email disruptions, British insurer Aviva activated backups for its earnings calls and Danish shipping giant Maersk warned customers of delayed updates. OpenAI and Anthropic faced issues with Microsoft connectors that were later resolved, and Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said email support services were impacted. In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies, with one company canceling a bond repurchase transaction and another resorting to fax to confirm trades, sources told Reuters. US electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its Thursday results to November 16, and Switzerland's Richemont briefly delayed its first-half results announcement on Friday.

In Australia, where the spy agency and federal police were among those caught in the outage, Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft does not suspect a cyberattack. "The impact that they are dealing with.. is very much on email systems," he added.