Microsoft said early on Saturday that its services had been fully restored after a worldwide outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot, the BBC reported. The company said work on the underlying problem was complete and that customers should no longer be affected. The outage hit more than 70 countries and products used by more than 430 million people worldwide. Microsoft apologised and said the fault was introduced during a "network capacity upgrade," not a cyber-attack or an artificial-intelligence agent. Users first reported trouble accessing Microsoft 365 on Thursday. By Friday the disruption had reached institutions from the Japanese government and the Philippines Supreme Court to the Australian spy agency, and trains, hospitals and courts in North America.

Microsoft first acknowledged that users in the Americas could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes at 17:54 GMT on Thursday and soon warned that Microsoft 365 could be affected globally. By 04:36 on Friday it was reporting only a "partial recovery" in some regions. By 13:32 it described "broader improvements" in North America, "sustained improvements" across much of Europe and "encouraging recovery signals" in Asia-Pacific. Services began to recover on Friday afternoon UK time, nearly 24 hours after the first reports. Microsoft said it restored systems gradually because of the scale of the problem and to keep them stable once they were back. "We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," a spokesperson said. A full post-incident report will follow a review.

In the United Kingdom, some parts of the NHS, some schools and some police forces were affected. Cyber minister Liz Lloyd said the impact on critical frontline services such as 999 calls had been "limited" and that the transport network was not disrupted. In Canada, the national rail network warned that passengers might not receive email updates, and hospitals had email problems. In the United States, House of Representatives staff told Politico a day of legislative work had been set back because it ran on Outlook. Singapore's government said some systems were hit. Advisers at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, could not reach Outlook. Peter Pentz, a South African winemaker, said his business was at a "standstill." In Staffordshire, a buyer named Georgia said her first house purchase, after eight months of waiting, was delayed because solicitors could not contact other agencies.

Experts called the episode a reminder of how much depends on a handful of cloud providers. Rob Demain, chief executive of cybersecurity firm e2e-assure, said it was a "stark reminder" of that reliance. Matt Saunders of consultancy Adaptavist said classic disaster planning suggests a second service for resilience, "but in practice, it's almost impossible for a business to function without tools such as Microsoft." The verified update is Microsoft's claim that services are fully restored, not a completed independent investigation into the upgrade that went wrong.