Microsoft outage recovery underway, no cyberattack evidence

Microsoft suffered a global outage on Thursday evening, disrupting services like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. The company reports recovery progress and states there is no evidence of a cyberattack. The outage began due to "high load" on Microsoft's infrastructure, affecting AI assistants from Anthropic and OpenAI as well. Downdetector reported impacts across 74 countries. Microsoft initially struggled with fixes but noted encouraging improvements in Europe and North America by Friday midday. Microsoft confirmed no malicious activity, attributing the issue to a technical change that caused cascading failures. The outage disrupted public services in France, the UK's NHS, and Japanese businesses. Microsoft will hold blocked emails for 48 hours to ensure delivery.