Microsoft apologises as global outage disrupts services in 74 countries

Microsoft has issued an apology following a global outage that disrupted services including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot across 74 countries and territories. The outage, which began on Thursday, affected users in the Americas as well as parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, according to The Korea Times. The disruption impacted various sectors, including businesses, schools, health care services, courts, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

The Korea Times reports that Microsoft ruled out malicious cyber or AI activity as the cause of the incident. CityNews states that Microsoft attributed the disruption to a network capacity upgrade. However, Wired reports that the company hinted at cascading server failures within multiple data centers, where unexpected server unavailability placed excessive load on the remaining infrastructure.

Microsoft reported a broad recovery and sustained improvements in service availability as of Friday. The company’s executive vice-president, Charles Lamanna, stated that the firm is reviewing the incident to prevent future occurrences.

Brief written by urgent.news from Punch Nigeria, Punch, The Korea Times, CityNews, Wired — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.