Microsoft completely restores its services after the global crash and rules out cyberattack or AI as the cause of the failure

Microsoft has recovered the operation of its main digital services after a global interruption that has affected companies, public organizations and users in more than 70 countries, causing problems in Outlook, Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, as reported by the Bloomberg agency.

The company has confirmed that all its applications are now operational and that it has processed the email messages accumulated during the incident. "All products are operational," he said in a statement collected by the aforementioned agency, in which he also indicated that the problem has been resolved.

The failure would have originated in a network capacity update and Microsoft has ruled out that it was related to a cyber attack or the use of artificial intelligence. More than 1,000 engineers and employees have participated in the recovery efforts, coordinated by those responsible for cloud services and the Microsoft 365 package.

The first investigations point to problems in Exchange, whose activity quickly consumed the available resources of the servers until they stopped responding. Possible causes examined included incorrect Azure network configuration. The consequences of the ruling have reached very diverse sectors.

According to Bloomberg, the first reports of the incident were recorded around 1:00 p.m. on Thursday on the US east coast. Subsequently, they multiplied on Downdetector, a digital platform that provides real-time information on the status of websites, applications and online services, where hundreds of thousands of complaints were recorded.

The episode has been a setback for Microsoft, whose M365 package has more than 450 million business users, although the markets barely reacted and its shares registered little variation.

Along these lines, analysts consulted by Bloomberg have pointed out that the fall will hardly modify the company's competitive position in the short term, due to the cost and complexity of replacing its tools. However, they have warned that some customers' interest in alternatives such as Google Workspace and Anthropic's new productivity solutions could increase.

Microsoft has regretted the consequences of the interruption, ensuring that the company will study what happened to prevent it from happening again. "We know that our customers depend on our services to perform important tasks every day and we regret the impact that these interruptions have had on those who trust us," said the person in charge of the Microsoft 365 package, Charles Lamanna, after learning of the incident.