Microsoft Apologizes After Outage Disrupts 70 Countries

Microsoft said it is "deeply sorry" after a global outage left Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 products unreliable for nearly 24 hours, according to BBC News. Services were broadly recovering by Friday afternoon, the company said, though it did not give a date for full restoration.

What caused the outage?

Microsoft said the issue stemmed from a technical problem introduced during a "network capacity upgrade," not a cyberattack or an artificial intelligence agent, BBC News reported. The company described progress on fixes as "encouraging" but stopped short of a timeline for complete recovery.

How many people were affected?

More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide, according to BBC News. The outage hit more than 70 countries, reaching institutions ranging from national governments to hospitals, courts and rail systems.

Which services and institutions went down?

Users first reported trouble accessing Microsoft 365 products on Thursday. By Friday, the disruption had reached the Japanese government, the Philippines Supreme Court, Australia's spy agency, and trains, hospitals and courts across North America, BBC News reported.

In the UK, parts of the NHS, including GPs and hospitals, were affected, along with some schools and police forces. UK cyber minister Liz Lloyd said the impact on critical frontline services such as 999 calls was "limited," and there was no disruption to the transport network, according to the BBC report.

In Canada, the national rail network said passengers might not receive email trip updates, and hospitals nationwide also reported email problems. In the US, House of Representatives staff told Politico, as cited by BBC News, that the outage set back a full day of legislative work because operations ran on Outlook. Singapore's government confirmed some systems were impacted, and India's outage disrupted work for many on Friday. At the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, officials and advisers were unable to access Outlook, BBC News reported.

Experts said the event was a "stark reminder" of how heavily businesses and vital services rely on a small group of big tech providers, according to BBC News.

What has Microsoft said about a fix?

Microsoft has not specified when all services will return to normal. The company's public statement, relayed by BBC News, acknowledged the scale of disruption and apologized directly to affected users without detailing further technical remediation steps.

What to watch

• Whether Microsoft publishes a full post-incident report identifying the root cause within its network capacity upgrade.
• Whether regulators or government agencies in affected countries request formal accountability measures.
• Whether businesses dependent on Microsoft 365, including hospitals, courts and rail operators, report lingering email or scheduling backlogs once service is restored.
• Whether Microsoft announces changes to how future infrastructure upgrades are tested before deployment.

Glossary

Network capacity upgrade: An update to expand or adjust the data-handling capacity of cloud infrastructure, the type of change Microsoft said triggered this outage.

Microsoft 365: The subscription bundle that includes Outlook, Teams and other productivity tools used by businesses and governments worldwide.

Outage: A period during which a service is unavailable or degraded for users, as distinct from a planned shutdown.