Microsoft confirms services fully restored after major global outage

Microsoft has confirmed that full service has been re-established following a widespread global IT disruption that affected schools, courts, businesses, police forces and the NHS.

The technology company announced on Saturday morning that functionality had returned for all remaining users affected by one of the most severe IT failures in recent years.

In a statement on its Microsoft 365 status page, the US-based firm stated: "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions.

"Further updates can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center."

Addressing the cause on Friday, Microsoft stated that the disruption was due to a "technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents".

Users reported that Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, were interrupted. Downdetector, an online tracker, said it received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories.

The outage affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places. Governments including those of Japan, Singapore and Australia reported that the hours-long episode had impacted some of their operations.

Emergency measures were activated by the UK government and international authorities, with Microsoft working to recover messaging, email and key services after they began failing around 6pm GMT on Thursday.

The National Pharmacy Association warned customers of delays in getting medication. The outage affected the National Health Service and threatened to prevent doctors from emailing prescriptions to pharmacies.

“Please bear with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays to some prescriptions,” a spokesperson said.

Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra noted that the failure mostly impacted back-office functions, with contingency plans put in place.

But she acknowledged there had been “limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery” and the incident had been “inconvenient and disruptive”.

The minister said she had spoken to Microsoft UK’s chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak on Thursday night.

Millions of its customers were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams, the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also affected for many.

Other AI chat services were disrupted, such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Police forces in England and Wales said on Friday they were unable to receive crime reports online.

Meanwhile, NHS England said health service staff were “enacting long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages, including using paper records.