# Microsoft Restores Global Services After 24-Hour Outage Disrupts Governments, Hospitals, Businesses > Source: > Published: 2026-11-14 16:50:51+00:00 Microsoft Corp. said on Saturday that it had fully restored its cloud and workplace services, ending a [massive, 24-hour global outage](https://techstrong.it/featured/microsoft-hit-by-widespread-outage-affecting-outlook-teams-copilot/) that disrupted governments, hospitals, financial institutions, and businesses across more than 70 countries. The failure, which began Thursday afternoon, crippled core applications including Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, hitting features tied to Microsoft’s Exchange Online hub. In a post on X, the tech giant stated it had resolved the underlying issue and apologized to customers and partners for the disruption. Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack or AI agents as the cause, attributing the failure instead to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, noted that complex “technical challenges and failure modes” slowed the recovery, adding that the company will publish a full post-mortem. The scale of the disruption underscored the global economy’s heavy reliance on a handful of Big Tech infrastructure providers. Outage tracking site Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking at nearly 20,000 per minute as workers in Asia and Europe logged on. While organizations running on-premises servers were largely spared, the cloud outage left millions unable to send emails, manage calendars, or hold virtual meetings. The fallout rippled across both public and private sectors: **Governments and public services.** In the United Kingdom, National Health Service (NHS) hospitals reverted to paper records, ambulance services faced severe impacts, and backlogged courts delayed hearings, with staff at one Manchester crown court scrambling to locate a fax machine. London’s Metropolitan Police also reported disruptions to online crime reporting. In the United States, staffers at the House of Representatives lost a day of work, school districts asked parents to call instead of email, and a Colorado detention facility required in-person cash payments to post bond. Government agencies, courts, and intelligence services in Australia, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France also reported email failures. **Finance and business.** Taiwanese securities firms and insurers saw fund management disrupted, forcing one firm to cancel a bond repurchase and another to confirm trades via fax. European exchange operator Euronext reported email issues, while U.S. electric truck maker Workhorse Group and Swiss luxury group Richemont delayed earnings announcements. **Tech and aviation.** OpenAI and Anthropic experienced temporary issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian carriers Air India, IndiGo, and Akasa Air rerouted customer support emails, though flight operations remained unaffected. Morningstar DBRS estimated global insured losses between $300 million and $500 million — significant, though lower than the $400 million to $1.5 billion toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Because the incident marks Microsoft’s second major 365 disruption this year, analysts warned it could prompt corporate IT departments to rethink their digital operations with a single vendor, even as steep switching costs make migrating away from deeply embedded workplace tools difficult.