Microsoft says its Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services have been fully restored after a global outage that disrupted email and online meetings for governments, businesses, hospitals and airlines in dozens of countries for more than a day.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the company said in an update on X on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.
Outage tracker Downdetector said it received reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories. Reports began climbing on Thursday evening, according to network monitor Ookla, and Reuters described the disruption as one of the longest in Microsoft’s history.
Email, calendars and meetings hit
Users were unable to send and receive emails, manage calendars or host virtual meetings. Microsoft said the problem affected features tied to Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and scheduling service, while organisations that run Microsoft services on their own servers were largely spared.
Governments including those of Japan, Singapore and Australia said some of their operations were affected. In the United Kingdom, NHS England said staff fell back on long-standing contingency measures, including paper records.
‘Not related to cyber’
Microsoft said the disruption was caused by a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents”, and that it was not aware of any malicious activity, according to The Independent and Reuters. US officials said there was no link between the outage and Friday’s nationwide flight ground stop in the United States.
Why it matters for Ghana
Many Ghanaian banks, businesses, universities and public offices rely on Outlook and Teams for daily work. The outage is a reminder for organisations to keep backup communication channels and contingency plans in place when cloud services fail.
Source: AP; Reuters via CNA and France 24; The Independent.
Featured image: Microsoft sign (illustrative). Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).