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Microsoft said Friday that its consumer products and services had fully recovered from a major global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services across at least 70 countries.
The U.S. technology company said recovery was completed as of 4:10 p.m. GMT Friday, while Microsoft 365 enterprise services were showing sustained recovery.
“We’ve confirmed that the services across the previously affected environments have fully recovered and the backlog of email messages has been processed, thus this issue is remediated,” Microsoft said on its service status page.
The company apologized for the disruption and said the outage was caused by a technical problem linked to an earlier network capacity upgrade, not by a cyberattack or artificial intelligence systems.
The disruption began Thursday and affected Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating problems in the Americas before confirming that Microsoft 365 connectivity could be affected in any region.
The outage disrupted businesses and public services, including health care, aviation and immigration processing.
In the U.K., the GMB union said National Health Service staff handling emergency calls were unable to refer patient information normally, creating a backlog.
In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air warned that their email support systems had been affected, while Immigration New Zealand temporarily halted visa application processing.
Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa said the disruption had a “significant impact” because Microsoft products were used by a large number of people.
Microsoft initially attributed the outage to elevated infrastructure load.
In an updated statement Friday, the company said the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said on X.
The company said it had addressed the underlying issue and ruled out malicious “cyber or AI” activity.
Reports of problems on Downdetector began declining by around 9 a.m. GMT Friday before Microsoft later confirmed full recovery of its consumer services.
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