Microsoft 'deeply sorry' for global outage after almost 24 hours of disruption

What the report says

Microsoft said it was “deeply sorry” after a widespread outage affected Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services across the world for almost 24 hours. According to BBC World News, the disruption began on Thursday evening GMT and was still only partially resolved by Friday afternoon, with the company saying it was making progress but could not yet say when full recovery would be complete.

The outage affected users in more than 70 countries and touched a wide range of institutions, including government bodies, courts, hospitals, transport providers and private businesses. Reported impacts included problems for parts of the UK National Health Service, Canadian rail and hospitals, the US House of Representatives, and organizations in Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, India and Turkey. Small businesses and individuals also reported delays to everyday work and transactions.

Microsoft said the problem came from a technical issue introduced during a network capacity upgrade and was not linked to cyber activity or AI systems. The company said it would publish a full post-incident review after completing its investigation. Experts quoted by BBC World News said the episode highlighted how dependent many organizations are on a small number of large cloud and software providers, and how difficult it is for businesses to operate when those systems fail.