Microsoft restores services after global outage affecting 74 countries

Microsoft announced Saturday that its services were fully restored after a global outage lasting hours, which affected governments and businesses in over 70 countries, including Outlook and Teams. The company stated it completed measures to resolve the incident's cause. The outage disrupted Microsoft 365 cloud services, including the Teams app, Copilot AI assistant, and third-party connections like OpenAI and Anthropic. Downdetector received reports from 74 countries, impacting governments, courts, health services, airlines, and banks in Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Microsoft apologized, stating the failure was not a cyberattack but caused by a problem during a network capacity update. Experts warn the incident highlights risks of excessive dependence on a single company's digital infrastructure, with 96% of German companies relying on foreign digital technologies.