Microsoft says services still returning amid widespread outage

What the report says

Microsoft said its email and other cloud services were steadily recovering on Friday after a widespread outage disrupted users in 74 countries and continued into a second day. According to Al Jazeera’s report, the disruption began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected Microsoft 365 products used by businesses, institutions and individuals, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

The company said the problem was tied to overloaded servers that became “unexpectedly available,” and it said there was no sign of a cyberattack or other malicious activity. Microsoft said service availability and email delivery were improving across affected systems, while some services were still not fully restored.

The outage created major operational problems in several regions. Reuters, cited in the report, said financial firms in Taiwan were hit hard, while Norway’s parliament, several Danish municipalities, rail operators in multiple countries and the UK’s National Health Service reported disruptions. In the United States, the House of Representatives and some local governments were also affected.

The incident is significant because it highlighted how heavily governments and major businesses depend on a small number of tech providers for communications and daily operations. Al Jazeera noted that this was Microsoft’s second service disruption this year and among the longest in the company’s history.