Microsoft said on Friday that all services affected by a widespread outage lasting more than 24 hours had been fully restored, bringing an end to a disruption that crippled online communications for businesses, governments and users around the world. The affected applications included Teams, Outlook and Copilot, which are among the most widely used workplace tools, with hundreds of millions of users.

The outage prevented people from performing essential tasks such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings. It also disrupted healthcare services, delayed corporate earnings reports and left schools struggling to communicate, illustrating how deeply organisations depend on the company's platforms.S1S2

Microsoft earlier attributed the incident to server issues, and said a broader rollout of software fixes was stabilising the system. The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity and ruled out artificial intelligence as the cause. In a further explanation, it said the problem originated during an earlier network capacity upgrade and surfaced following a subsequent network change, adding that it had addressed the underlying issue.S1S2

The company apologised for the disruption, saying it recognised the trust customers and partners place in its services and took that responsibility extremely seriously. Microsoft said it would publish a detailed post-incident report once its review was complete.S2