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Microsoft has fully restored services across Teams, Outlook and its other products following a global outage that disrupted online communications for businesses, government agencies and other organisations for more than 24 hours, while ruling out malicious activity as the cause.
The company announced the restoration on Saturday, saying it had resolved the underlying technical issue and restored services to all affected customers and regions.
The disruption, which began generating widespread reports on Thursday, affected Microsoft’s workplace applications, including Teams, Outlook and its Copilot AI assistant, disrupting essential business operations such as email communication, calendar management and virtual meetings.
Microsoft rules out malicious activity in global outage
Microsoft said server-related issues were behind the outage and that it was not aware of any malicious activity.
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The company also ruled out artificial intelligence as the cause of the disruption.
- “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 a post on X.
The outage specifically affected features connected to Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email and scheduling service, while applications not connected to the affected infrastructure continued operating.
- Its impact extended beyond individual users, with government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States reporting disruptions.
- Trading firms experienced delays, some companies encountered difficulties publishing financial results, while airlines warned customers of possible communication delays.
- Organisations running Microsoft services on their own servers rather than through its cloud infrastructure were relatively less affected.
According to Ookla, which operates outage-tracking platform Downdetector, the platform logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, with reports peaking at nearly 20,000 per minute, more than 1,500 times normal levels.
Potential financial implications
The outage could trigger insurance claims from businesses affected by operational disruptions and financial losses, although the overall impact on insurers is expected to remain limited.
Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses from the incident at between $300 million and $500 million, according to Reuters.
The estimate is below the $400 million to $1.5 billion in financial losses associated with the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which crashed more than 8 million Windows-based computers and disrupted businesses and services worldwide.
Microsoft’s shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday, leaving the stock up approximately 8% so far this year.
Other major technology outages
The latest disruption is not the first time a major technology provider has experienced an outage affecting businesses and digital services globally. Previous Nairametrics reports have highlighted similar incidents involving Microsoft and other major cloud infrastructure providers.
- In July 2024, Nairametrics reported that Microsoft was investigating a global technical glitch affecting Outlook, Word, Excel and other Microsoft 365 services. Users experienced connectivity problems, with some unable to access the applications.
- The company had also experienced a similar disruption in September 2020, when a software bug affected Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Office and Azure cloud services globally. Microsoft attributed the incident to a recent change that it was rolling back to restore services.
Beyond Microsoft, other major technology infrastructure providers have experienced outages with widespread consequences. In October 2025, Nairametrics reported that an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted several global platforms, including Snapchat, Canva, Zoom and Slack.
