Microsoft outage costs top $7 billion after 35-hour global disruption

A global Microsoft 365 outage lasting over 35 hours caused estimated damages exceeding $7 billion, disrupting services for millions of users worldwide. The disruption, which began on November 12th, affected critical sectors including hospitals, police, banks, and airlines. Some organizations were forced to use paper records and fax machines. Microsoft attributed the issue to a faulty software update that overloaded servers, ruling out a cyberattack. Full restoration of services like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot was announced on November 14th. The outage also impacted financial exchanges and companies such as OpenAI, with individual users regaining access before corporate clients.