Microsoft announced on Friday that its consumer products and services had fully recovered from a major global outage that disrupted access to email, Microsoft Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot for millions of users across at least 70 countries.
The US technology giant confirmed that consumer services had been restored by 1610 GMT on Friday, while its Microsoft 365 enterprise services were showing sustained recovery following the widespread disruption.
In an update published on its service status page, Microsoft said the technical problems affecting previously disrupted systems had been resolved and that delayed email messages had been processed.
“We’ve confirmed that the services across the previously affected environments have fully recovered and the backlog of email messages has been processed, thus this issue is remediated,” the company stated.
The outage affected users across multiple countries, interrupting access to essential communication and productivity tools used by individuals, businesses and organisations.
Among the affected services were Microsoft’s email platforms, Teams collaboration software and Copilot, the company’s AI-powered assistant.
The disruption caused difficulties for users attempting to access their accounts, communicate through email and use Microsoft’s online productivity services.
Microsoft apologised for the inconvenience caused by the outage and said its technical teams had worked to restore affected systems.
The company attributed the incident to a technical issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade.
It clarified that the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack and was unrelated to the operation of its artificial intelligence systems.
The explanation ruled out speculation that malicious activity or problems involving AI technology had triggered the widespread service interruptions.
While consumer products and services were confirmed to have fully recovered, Microsoft said its enterprise Microsoft 365 services were demonstrating sustained recovery.
The company also confirmed that the backlog of email messages accumulated during the disruption had been cleared.
The incident highlighted the dependence of individuals and organisations worldwide on cloud-based communication and productivity platforms, with a technical problem affecting Microsoft’s infrastructure causing disruptions across dozens of countries.
Microsoft’s latest update indicated that the underlying issue had been remediated, bringing an end to the major outage that had affected users internationally.