By Ghazali Ibrahim
Microsoft has restored its services worldwide after a major outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications for more than 24 hours.
The company announced on Saturday, November 14, 2026, that it had resolved the technical problem and restored services to customers and regions still experiencing disruptions.
The outage, which began on Thursday, November 12, affected users in more than 70 countries and territories, disrupting communication and other online activities for businesses, government agencies and public institutions.
Other affected services included SharePoint, Exchange Online, OneDrive and Microsoft 365.
According to reports, the disruption prevented users from sending emails, managing calendars and holding virtual meetings, affecting organisations that depend on Microsoft’s platforms for daily operations.
Downdetector, an online platform that tracks service disruptions, recorded more than 7.4 million reports worldwide during the incident, although the figure does not represent the actual number of people affected.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to a technical issue involving an earlier network-capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a subsequent network change.
The company said the incident was not linked to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents, adding that engineers had worked to address the underlying problem and restore affected services.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” Microsoft said in an update.
The outage affected several critical operations across different countries, including government activities, healthcare services, airline communications and financial transactions.
In the United Kingdom, some healthcare providers experienced disruptions, while airlines in India also reported problems with email support services.
Microsoft apologised to affected customers and partners, acknowledging the disruption caused by the incident.
The company said it would publish a detailed post-incident report explaining the sequence of events and measures being considered to prevent a recurrence.
The incident has renewed concerns about the dependence of businesses and public institutions on a small number of technology providers for essential digital services.
