A botched network upgrade knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for more than a day, renewing questions about reliance on a single cloud provider.
LAHORE: Microsoft said on Saturday that all of its services had been fully restored, ending an outage of more than 24 hours that cut off email and workplace tools for governments, banks, hospitals and businesses in 74 countries.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the company said on X. It reported full restoration at 1:09 a.m. US Eastern time, or 11:09 a.m. in Pakistan.
Users began reporting problems with Outlook at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, 9 p.m. in Pakistan, and the fault spread to Teams, the Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 products built on its Exchange Online email service.
Microsoft apologised on Friday and said the incident stemmed from an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a later change. It said there was no sign of a cyberattack. The company says more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps.
Britain’s National Health Service fell back on paper records. Norway’s parliament and several ministries lost email, and the Euronext exchange told companies to phone in trades. Banks in Taiwan resorted to fax machines, and rail operators in Britain, Germany and Canada reported trouble with timetables and emailed tickets. The US House of Representatives and a string of American city governments were also affected.
It was one of the longest outages in Microsoft’s history and its second major disruption this year. One preliminary estimate carried by Indian media put the global productivity cost at close to $7 billion, a figure that has not been independently confirmed.
The outage began after office hours in Pakistan but ran through the whole of Friday’s working day. Microsoft 365 is widely used by Pakistani banks, telecom operators, universities and the software and outsourcing firms that serve American and European clients, whose work depends on shared mailboxes and Teams calls.
Pakistan has felt such shocks before. During the July 2024 global IT failure caused by a faulty security update, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority confirmed that Microsoft services were disrupted for users in the country.
The episode strengthens the case for contingency planning: a second email route, offline copies of critical documents and an agreed fallback for meetings. It also feeds a wider debate about concentration risk as Pakistan builds locally hosted cloud and AI capacity and as global platforms such as Google deepen their presence in the country.
Microsoft said it would review the incident and the steps needed to prevent a repeat.
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