Arabic version: مايكروسوفت تعلن تعافياً واسعاً بعد انقطاع عالمي
According to ABC News, Microsoft has apologised for a global outage affecting services including Outlook and Teams, saying it was seeing “broad recovery and stability” while restoration work continued for remaining customers and regions. The company said it was “deeply sorry” for the disruption to customers and partners.
Microsoft said the incident was a technical issue and was not related to malicious cyber activity or AI agents. It attributed the disruption to elevated load on its infrastructure following a network capacity upgrade. In a later statement, the company said an issue introduced during an earlier capacity upgrade had surfaced after a recent network change, and that it had addressed the underlying issue.
The outage affected Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector, disrupting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa. Microsoft 365, the company’s cloud-based subscription service, includes applications such as Outlook and Teams. Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports in the Americas before confirming that Microsoft 365 connectivity could be affected in any region.
Public services and businesses reported significant effects. The GMB union said the disruption had a serious impact on the United Kingdom’s healthcare service, with National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls unable to refer patient details normally, creating a backlog. Immigration New Zealand halted processing of all visa applications, while IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services had been affected.
Japan’s economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa warned of a significant impact because Microsoft products are used by a vast number of people. The Australian Computer Society called for a national review of sovereign IT risk, with chief executive Prins Ralston saying small businesses may not have a workaround when Outlook fails.
