Microsoft resolves global outage, warns of phishing scams exploiting the disruption

Microsoft announced Saturday that it has fully resolved the global outage affecting its services, including Outlook and Microsoft 365, which began Friday. The company confirmed the incident was not caused by a cyberattack. The outage disrupted services for tens of thousands of users across more than 74 countries and territories, including Copilot and ChatGPT assistants. Microsoft attributed the issue to an unexpected number of unavailable servers causing high load, with restoration progressing gradually since Friday afternoon. Microsoft Threat Intelligence reported an active phishing campaign exploiting the outage, with emails falsely claiming messages would be deleted within 24 hours. The company stated it is monitoring the backlog of accumulated emails to ensure all are processed successfully.