Microsoft announces service ‘restored,’ global outage over

Microsoft has officially declared the restoration of its services, following a widespread disruption on Thursday that impacted customers across the globe, according to a statement released on Saturday. The tech giant, headquartered in the US, attributed the outage to a technical issue, clarifying that it was not the result of a cyberattack or AI agents, as initially reported by the company the day prior.

The outage affected critical services such as Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and the company's Copilot AI assistant, causing chaos and disrupting business operations worldwide. By the time Microsoft announced the recovery, the disruption had affected at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as per monitoring data from Downdetector.

Despite the restoration of service, Microsoft issued a warning about an active phishing campaign that was exploiting the incident. The emails, which mimicked official service notifications, advised recipients to click on links to supposedly restore messages that had been blocked during the outage, potentially leading to unintended consequences.