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Microsoft says its service is returning to normal after a “historic” global outage that disrupted work for millions of customers on Friday.
The company said the underlying issue was resolved and that the disruption was due to a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI/agents.”
“We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services,” Microsoft said on social media.
“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.”
Microsoft determined that the outage, which began around midday Thursday, was not the result of a malicious attack, based on initial information.
Experts said the incident had little precedent.
“It’s the global scale of it and the duration that make it historic,” Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and former Microsoft employee, told The Post.
Millions of Microsoft users — including government workers, hospital employees, business owners and students — lost access to Outlook email and the company’s messaging system, Teams, during the outage. Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot was affected, too.
Hospitals in the UK had to temporarily rely on paper records, according to the BBC. Pharmacies there were concerned about filling prescriptions, too.
US congressional staffers told Politico that the outage derailed policy negotiations.
Some rejoiced that the outage gave them an excuse to clock out of work early Thursday, mourning the return of services Friday.
“To the Microsoft employees desperately trying to bring Outlook back online, please don’t push yourselves too hard,” one person wrote tongue-in-cheek on X.
The company is a major partner with OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies saw technical failures with their products during the outage, according to reports.
Microsoft promised a post mortem down the road.
Noting Microsoft’s alert system appeared not to work, Moussouris said: “Something really bad must have happened that the cascade was not only as long lasting, but they couldn’t recover.”
The disruption came during a challenging time for the tech giant.
It recently offered buyouts to over a quarter of its workforce — 60,000 employees — as it looked to cut costs and restructure its staff to meet the AI moment.
Last year, the company laid off 9,000 employees. Industry experts and users on social media were quick to conjecture that Microsoft’s cost-cutting measures brought on the outage, though they offered no evidence.
The tech giant has been doubling down on building AI infrastructure and securing partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic.