Microsoft outage hits 74 countries for 12+ hours; no cyberattack found

A global outage has affected Microsoft services for over 12 hours across at least 74 countries, with the company ruling out a cyberattack as the cause. Services remain unstable, and no timeline for full restoration has been provided. Microsoft reported "positive results" and "marginal success" in fixing the issue, which impacts Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Copilot 365. The company confirmed no evidence of malicious activity, citing an overloaded essential server process as the technical cause. The outage disrupted airlines, governments in Singapore, Australia, and Japan, and AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic. Peak complaints occurred Thursday afternoon, with over 430 million Microsoft 365 users affected, prompting some Asian companies to give employees the morning off.