Microsoft is gradually restoring its services following a day-long global outage triggered by a cascading software failure that disrupted several of the company’s systems.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, was initially reported to have affected services in the United States and other parts of the Americas before spreading to other regions worldwide, as engineers struggled to restore affected servers.
What started as an outage affecting Outlook email and Teams video conferencing quickly escalated into a wider disruption, hitting Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and affecting consumer and business services, including email, file storage and document access.
The disruption also affected Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence tools and Defender security software, while system administrators were unable to access internal Intune dashboards and related features.
Some users also reported difficulties accessing their cloud-based Windows computers.
Microsoft has yet to identify the cause of the outage, stating only that a large number of its servers had become unexpectedly unavailable.
The company said investigations were ongoing as engineers worked to determine what triggered the disruption.
The incident affected organisations across several industries, disrupting access to essential business tools and communication services.
