Microsoft announces service ‘restored,’ global outage over

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP)—Tech giant Microsoft said Saturday it has "restored service" to customers, effectively drawing a close to a massive outage that caused chaos and disrupted public services and business around the world. "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the US-based company said in an X post. Microsoft had already reported a "broad recovery" for Outlook email and other services the day before, stating the major disruption was due to a technical issue and "not related to cyber or AI/agents." The outage swept the globe on Thursday, taking the company's products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the monitoring site Downdetector. Microsoft had attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. It said the stoppage affected its Outlook email service, as well as Microsoft's Teams communication platform and the company's Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft warned Saturday of an "active phishing campaign" to exploit the disruption, with fake emails imitating its service notifications. The emails, detected on Friday, instructed users that messages blocked during the outage would be deleted if the recipient does not click to restore them.