Microsoft: Systems completely restored after disruption

According to the US software company, the massive disruption to Microsoft's central cloud offerings has ended.

All systems were running again, the company announced on its website on Saturday morning (CET).

“We have completed our efforts to address the cause of the incident and restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions,” Microsoft also wrote on the short message platform X.

The problems started on Thursday evening.

This affected not only the Outlook email service, but also services from the Microsoft 365 cloud package in general.

Users were temporarily unable to send emails, manage calendars or hold video conferences.

In addition, the AI ​​assistant Copilot and interfaces to third-party providers were temporarily disrupted, including AI services such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The disruption impacted businesses and governments and other users worldwide, as Outlook and Teams are among the most widely used office applications.

For example, the secret service and the federal police in Australia reported failures.

The Canberra government activated an agreement with Microsoft to ensure priority system restoration.

The US House of Representatives also reported restrictions for its users.

The work of federal authorities in Germany has apparently not been affected.

“The federal administration is operational and essentially not affected by the failure,” said a spokesman for the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) on Friday.

By Friday afternoon, Microsoft had already made gradual progress.

The company then emphasized that the disruption was due to a domestic problem and not to a cyberattack or AI activity.

There is also no connection to the technical breakdown that has led to thousands of flight cancellations in the USA since late Friday evening (CET).

The reason was ultimately a previously carried out upgrade of the network capacity.

A problem that was introduced only became apparent after recent network changes, it was said.

It is the second outage of Microsoft 365 services this year, following similar problems in January.

Just last month, a failure of the Azure cloud platform caused disruptions worldwide.