Tech giant Microsoft said it had “restored service” to customers, effectively drawing a close to a massive outage that caused chaos and disrupted public services and business around the world.
The US-based company said in an X post: “We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions.”
Microsoft had already reported a “broad recovery” for Outlook email and other services, stating the major disruption was due to a technical issue and “not related to cyber or AI/agents”.
The outage swept the globe on Friday, taking the company’s products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the monitoring site Downdetector.
Microsoft had attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure. It said the stoppage affected its Outlook email service, as well as Microsoft’s Teams communication platform and the company’s Copilot AI assistant.
A Microsoft statement on X said: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents.”
In New Zealand, the outage affected everything from the processing of visa applications and property settlements to courts and the healthcare system.
The UK experienced similar issues, with medical staff unable to access patient details. Airlines in India warned that the outage affected customer services, and Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa warned of a “significant impact” of the outage as the Microsoft products were used by a “vast number of people”.
The Australian Computer Society (ACS) called for a national review of sovereign IT risk, with chief executive Prins Ralston saying that small businesses may not have a workaround when Outlook fails.
Ralston said: “We need to know the systems that keep this country running won’t simply fall over without notice.”
- AFP