American multinational technology conglomerate, Microsoft, has confirmed that its services have been fully restored following a worldwide outage that disrupted access to several of its products, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, across more than 70 countries.

The technology company announced early Saturday that it had completed work to resolve the underlying technical problem, assuring customers that the affected services were operating normally again.

The outage, which began on Thursday, affected businesses, government institutions and individual users, with more than 430 million people worldwide relying on the products involved.

Microsoft attributed the disruption to a problem introduced during a “network capacity upgrade”. The company also ruled out a cyber-attack or an artificial intelligence agent as the cause and apologised to customers for the incident.

The widespread disruption exposed the dependence of businesses and essential public services on a handful of major technology providers, with experts describing the incident as a “stark reminder” of the risks associated with that reliance.

Several countries reported significant disruptions as the technical problems persisted for almost 24 hours before services began recovering on Friday afternoon UK time.

Among the affected institutions were the Japanese government, the Philippines Supreme Court and Australia’s spy agency. Transport services, hospitals and courts in North America also experienced difficulties.

In the United Kingdom, parts of the National Health Service (NHS), alongside some schools and police forces, were affected. However, UK cyber minister Liz Lloyd said the disruption had “limited” impact on critical frontline services, including 999 emergency calls, adding that the transport network had not been affected.

Canada’s national rail network warned that passengers might be unable to receive email updates about their journeys, while hospitals across the country also experienced email-related problems.

In the United States, employees of the House of Representatives told Politico that the outage had disrupted an entire day of legislative activities because the institution relied on Microsoft’s Outlook services.

Singapore’s government also confirmed that some of its systems had been affected, while businesses and workers in India experienced disruptions on Friday.

At the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, advisers and government officials were among those affected, with some expressing frustration over their inability to access Outlook.

The disruption extended beyond government institutions and major organisations, leaving smaller businesses and individuals struggling to continue their daily activities.

Peter Pentz, a winemaker in South Africa, said the outage had brought virtually every aspect of his business to a “standstill”.

He explained that communication relating to his winery’s exports had been disrupted, while essential production activities were suspended because the Cape West Coast-based business depended on Microsoft’s systems for some of its daily operations.

The outage also affected individuals with important personal transactions to complete.

Georgia, from Staffordshire in England, said she had been preparing to complete her first house purchase after waiting eight months for the process to reach its final stage. However, the Microsoft disruption threatened to delay the transaction.

“The solicitor mentioned there may be a delay due to not being able to contact other agencies,” she said.

“We’re not the only one completing today – there are hundreds of houses and for them to ring everyone in time is unfeasible.” (Tribune )