Microsoft says all services working again

The US technology conglomerate Microsoft said on Saturday that a more than 24-hour global outage affecting its Microsoft 365 applications used by businesses and governments across the world has now ended.

"We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the company posted on X.

Microsoft applications such as Teams, Outlook and Copilot were all hit by the outage, leading to communications problems in scores of countries.

The company has said it was "not aware" of any outside interference that could have been behind the outage, blaming the problem on server issues.

The disruption was one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second this year.

What effects did the Microsoft outage have?

The outage, which began around 1725 UTC on Thursday according to web testing and network diagnostics company Ookla, affected government agencies and businesses across much of the world.

It made it impossible to carry out activities such as sending emails and holding online meetings.

Germany was no exception, with a spokesperson for its Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization saying that while the outage did not have a major impact on federal government functions, it did significantly affect German businesses.

Britain's state health service (NHS) was also severely affected, with personnel forced to have recourse to paper records rather than those stored online.

Altogether, there were more than 7.4 million reports of problems worldwide logged by Downdetector, which monitors online outages.

The disruption highlights the widespread and perilous reliance of governments and businesses on a very small number of Big Tech companies.