Microsoft restores services after global outage hit 70 countries

Microsoft says services fully restored after hourslong global outage. The outage affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places. Microsoft said Saturday that services were fully restored after a massive outage that lasted for hours. Users reported that Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, were interrupted. Downdetector received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories. Governments including those of Japan, Singapore and Australia reported that the hourslong episode had impacted some of their operations. Problems started appearing around midday Thursday in the U.S. Microsoft apologized on Friday and said the outage was "not related to cyber" or artificial intelligence agents. It said the incident "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced" following a recent network change. The disruptions offer the latest example of the cascading problems that can erupt when so many communications and technology platforms depend on the same provider.