Microsoft has confirmed the full recovery of its consumer product services following an almost 18-hour global outage that disrupted businesses, schools, governments, and airlines across at least 74 countries.
According to an update on the company’s service status page, consumer services returned to normal at 4:10 p.m. UTC on Friday. While Microsoft 365 enterprise services are also showing sustained recovery, the tech giant noted it is actively monitoring an accrued email backlog and maintaining extended oversight before declaring the incident fully resolved.
Earlier on Friday, Microsoft issued a public apology to customers and partners on social media platform X, acknowledging the severity of the disruption. The outage impacted major platforms—including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot—as well as airline operations and third-party AI connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic. Outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded over 138,000 peak user complaints for Outlook alone before numbers steadily declined.
Addressing the root cause, Microsoft clarified that the breakdown stemmed from an internal technical glitch introduced during a previous network capacity upgrade, which surfaced after a recent network change. The company explicitly ruled out any connection to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.
Microsoft stated it gradually restored services to validate system stability under heavy demand and committed to releasing a comprehensive post-incident review once its investigation concludes.
