Microsoft announces service ‘restored,’ global outage over

On Saturday, tech giant Microsoft announced that it had fully restored service to its customers following a massive global outage that had caused widespread disruption. According to the company, the technical issue behind the incident had been addressed and service was now restored in the remaining affected regions. Microsoft had previously reported a broad recovery for its Outlook email and other services the day prior, attributing the major disruption to a technical problem and not to cyberattacks or AI agents.

The outage, which began on Thursday, impacted the company's products in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Monitoring site Downdetector confirmed the global effects of the disruption. Microsoft had initially attributed the stoppage to elevated load on its infrastructure, affecting its Outlook email service, Microsoft's Teams communication platform, and the company's Copilot AI assistant.

Following the restoration of service, Microsoft issued a warning about an active phishing campaign aimed at exploiting the disruption. Fake emails, designed to imitate its service notifications, were detected on Friday. These emails instructed users that messages blocked during the outage would be deleted if they did not click to restore them.