Downtime for more than 24 hours: Microsoft's global outage ends

(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) US technology giant Microsoft said on Saturday (November 14) that the global service outage affecting Microsoft 365 applications used by enterprises and governments in various countries has ended. The outage lasted for more than 24 hours.

Microsoft posted on X: "We have completed work to resolve the root cause of this incident and restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions."

Microsoft applications such as Teams, Outlook and Copilot were all affected by the service outage, causing communication problems in dozens of countries.

Microsoft said it was "not aware" of any external interference that may have caused the outage and blamed the problem on a server failure.

The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second this year.

Global impact: Unable to send and receive emails, hospitals switch to paper records

According to data from network testing and network diagnostics company Ookla, the service outage began at approximately 17:25 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on Thursday (November 12) (18:25 German time), affecting government agencies and enterprises in most parts of the world.

Users cannot send or receive emails or hold online meetings.

Germany is not immune. A spokesman for the German Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization said that although the disruption did not have a major impact on the operations of the federal government, it had a serious impact on German businesses.

The British National Health Service (NHS) has also been severely affected, with staff having to switch to paper records and unable to access information stored online.

Downdetector, a website that monitors network service outages, has received more than 7.4 million outage reports worldwide.

The outage highlights the pervasive and risky reliance of governments and businesses on a handful of large technology companies.

The problems at Microsoft are currently not believed to be related to a major communications outage affecting the U.S. airline industry this week.