Microsoft says services fully restored after global outage hits governments

Microsoft has said its services have been fully restored following a sweeping outage that disrupted governments, businesses and public services across the globe.

The US-based technology company announced on Saturday morning that it had brought service back to the last customers affected by what ranks among the worst IT failures in years. On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions." It directed users to further updates at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

The outage, which started on Thursday, hit governments, courts, healthcare providers, businesses, airlines and banks. The governments of Japan, Singapore and Australia were among those reporting that the hours-long episode disrupted some of their operations.

In the UK, where NHS England holds a five-year deal to use Microsoft 365, essential public services were affected. Hospital staff fell back on paper records, and one union said ambulance services suffered a "serious impact". The court system, already struggling with backlogs, saw juries sent home early in some cases and prisoners not brought to court, while staff at Minshull Street crown court in Manchester scrambled to find a fax machine.

In the US, school districts told parents to contact their child's school by phone or online apps, and House of Representatives staffers told Politico they had lost a day of work. A detention facility in Colorado said it could not process online bond payments and instructed anyone needing to post bond for immediate release to appear in person at the jail.

Australia saw councils, courts and schools cut off from their inboxes, with the federal police and Asio, the national domestic security and intelligence agency, also affected. Asio's director general, Mike Burgess, said the agency's systems "operate on multiple levels" and had been hit "on one level, yes, but not completely". Government agencies in the Netherlands, Belgium and France reported problems as well, with one French municipality telling citizens to phone rather than email.

In Japan, government email services went down and staff turned to text messaging, while the shipping firm Sagawa Express could not take some online reservations and pharmaceutical company Taisho handled orders by phone. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were disrupted, and Taiwanese security firms, life insurers and investment trust companies told Reuters that fund management services had been interrupted. Downdetector, an online tracker, said it received outage reports from more than 70 countries and territories, with users reporting problems across Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

The Washington-based company apologised on Friday and said the outage was "not related to cyber" or artificial intelligence agents, explaining that the incident "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced" after a recent network change. Problems began at about midday Thursday in the US and at 6pm in the UK.

The disruption has intensified concerns, particularly in the UK, about overreliance on a small number of technology providers. Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London, told the Guardian that outages of this scale usually stem from "some surprising interaction between systems", adding: "It's very hard to build a complex system without there being some risk of some failure." Tim Clement-Jones, a former chair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, called the episode an "I-told-you-so moment" for Britain's dependence on US tech, while Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, said it "may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem".

The total number of people affected remains unclear. Microsoft says approximately 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, and the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.