Technology giant Microsoft said on Saturday (14 November) that a major system outage that caused widespread disruption was largely over and services had been “restored”.
AFP reported that Microsoft said in a post on social media platform X: “We have completed work to address the underlying issue behind this incident and restored services for the remaining affected customers and regions.”
Microsoft said the previous day that it had “fully restored” Outlook email and other services, noting that the major outage stemmed from a technical fault and was “unrelated to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence and agents”.
According to data from outage monitoring website Downdetector, the disruption that began on Thursday affected Microsoft products worldwide, preventing them from working normally in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Microsoft had earlier attributed the outage to “excessive load” on its infrastructure.
The company said the affected services included Outlook email, the Microsoft Teams communications platform and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot.
Microsoft also warned on Saturday that the outage was being exploited in an “active phishing campaign”, with fraudulent emails being sent to mimic Microsoft service notifications.
The emails tell recipients that messages blocked during the outage will be deleted unless they click a link to recover them.
