Microsoft (MSFT) Restores 365 Services After 36-Hour Global Outage

Service restored across Microsoft 365

Microsoft brought Microsoft 365 back online worldwide on Saturday, ending a disruption that had blocked access to Outlook, Teams and other workplace applications for more than a full day. The company's Microsoft 365 status account announced at 06:09 UTC that it had "restored service" to the remaining impacted customers and regions, directing administrators to incident MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Engineers traced the failure to a defect introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, one that only surfaced after a subsequent network change. In a statement posted on Friday, the company stressed the episode was "not related to cyber or AI/agents" and apologized for the interruption. The problems began Thursday, when users could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes and mail delivery slowed or stalled. Teams meeting scheduling and Microsoft 365 Copilot were also affected, and government agencies in Japan, Singapore and the United States reported email failures. Connections between Microsoft 365 and external AI assistants broke as well: OpenAI confirmed the Microsoft 365 connector inside ChatGPT was operating normally again, while Anthropic marked its own connector incident and the Claude for Outlook outage as resolved. Recovery proceeded in stages rather than all at once. The company said demand was heavy enough that it restored service in batches, checking stability at each step before moving to the next, a slower process it defended as the safer one. A full post-incident report is promised once the internal review is complete, though no publication date has been set.

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74 countries reported in the first hour

The scale of the disruption became clear almost immediately. The fault-reporting site Downdetector received reports from 74 countries and regions within roughly an hour of the first failures, which the company's status account logged at 17:54 UTC on Thursday. From that start point to Saturday's all-clear, the incident ran about 36 hours. Microsoft had already reported broad recovery early on Saturday, yet waited roughly 12 more hours before declaring the problem fully resolved, explaining that it needed extended observation time and had to process the entire backlog of mail accumulated during the outage before closing incident MO1550821. Charles Lamanna, the executive vice president responsible for Copilot, AI agents and platform, explained on Saturday morning that the investigation pointed to cascading failures compounded by a "thundering herd" effect at the network edge, meaning large volumes of reconnecting clients arrived simultaneously as services came back, which made the repair harder than a single failure would have been. He said a post-incident review with a step-by-step timeline and several fixes intended to prevent a repeat would follow shortly. Investors barely reacted: shares closed up 0.36% on Thursday and another 0.17% on Friday, suggesting markets treated the outage as an operational event rather than a structural one.

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