Microsoft says Outlook, Teams and Copilot are fully restored after a worldwide outage that affected more than 70 countries and more than 430 million users.
Microsoft says its services have been fully restored after a worldwide outage affected several of its tools, causing disruption. The company said early on Saturday morning that efforts to address the underlying problem had been completed and customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should no longer be affected.
The outage hit more than 70 countries, disrupting business operations, government services and personal users. More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide. Users began reporting trouble accessing Microsoft 365 products on Thursday. Microsoft first acknowledged users in the Americas were unable to access Exchange Online mailboxes at 17:54 GMT on Thursday, and shortly after warned the disruption was possibly affecting Microsoft 365 globally.
By 04:36 on Friday Microsoft was reporting only a "partial recovery" in some parts of the world. By 13:32 the company said there had been "broader improvements" in North America, "sustained improvements" across much of Europe and "encouraging recovery signals" in the Asia Pacific region. Services were beginning to recover by Friday afternoon UK time, nearly 24 hours after the issues first began to emerge.
Microsoft said the issue was introduced during a "network capacity upgrade" and was not caused by a cyber-attack or an artificial intelligence agent. The company apologised for the technical issue.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously."
A full post-incident report will be released once Microsoft has completed a review.
The outage affected institutions from the Japanese government and the Philippines Supreme Court to the Australian spy agency, and trains, hospitals and courts in North America. In the UK, some parts of the NHS were affected, as were some schools and police forces. UK cyber minister Liz Lloyd said the incident had "limited" impact on critical frontline services such as 999 calls and that there had been no disruption to the transport network.
In Canada, the national rail network said passengers may not be able to receive email updates about their trips, and hospitals across the country also had issues with emails. In the US, staff members from the House of Representatives told Politico it had set back an entire day of legislative work as everything was on Microsoft's Outlook. Singapore's government acknowledged some of its systems had been impacted, and in India, the outage disrupted work for many on Friday. In Turkey, advisers and officials attending the COP31 climate summit in Antalya were left frustrated by being unable to access Outlook.
Peter Pentz, a winemaker in South Africa, said his entire business had been effectively brought to a "standstill". Georgia from Staffordshire in England said her first house purchase was delayed after waiting eight months.
Experts said the event was a "stark reminder" of how heavily businesses and vital services rely on a small group of big tech providers. Rob Demain, chief executive of cybersecurity firm e2e-assure, said the global Microsoft outage is a stark reminder of how heavily we rely on a handful of big tech providers. Matt Saunders, field chief technology officer at tech consultancy Adaptavist, said organisations must have a plan in place for how to work without such tools when incidents like this occur.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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Microsoft says it has completed efforts to address the underlying issue and restored service to remaining impacted customers and regions after a more than 24-hour outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot.
The FAA lifted a nationwide flight grounding order at 8:15 pm Eastern Time on November 13, 2026, after about four hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy cited outdated telecommunications equipment and said returning to normal operations would take time.
