Microsoft says service fully restored after major global outage

Detailed summary

Millions of customers worldwide were affected by one of the worst IT failures in years.

Microsoft has said service was fully restored after a major global outage that saw police forces, the NHS, businesses, courts and schools among those impacted.

The technology giant said on Saturday morning it had restored service to the remaining customers impacted by one of the worst IT failures in years.

On its Microsoft 365 status page, the US-based firm said: “We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions.

“Further updates can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.”

The UK Government and its counterparts worldwide were forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage, while Microsoft scrambled to restore email, messaging and other services after they began to go down from 6pm GMT on Thursday.

Microsoft on Friday said the outage was caused by a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents”.

Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the issue mainly affected back-office functions, with contingency measures put in place.

But she acknowledged there had been “limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery” and the incident had been “inconvenient and disruptive”.

The minister said she had spoken to Microsoft UK’s chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.

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