Microsoft restores Teams, Outlook after 24-hour global outage, rules out cyberattack

Microsoft has fully restored Teams, Outlook and its other products after a global outage disrupted online communications for businesses, government agencies and other organisations for more than 24 hours. The company said it had resolved the underlying technical issue and restored services to all affected customers and regions, while ruling out malicious activity as the cause.

The disruption began generating widespread reports on Thursday. It affected Microsoft workplace applications including Teams, Outlook and Copilot AI assistant, disrupting email communication, calendar management and virtual meetings. Microsoft announced the restoration on Saturday.

Server issue, not cyberattack

Microsoft said server-related issues were behind the outage and that it was not aware of any malicious activity. The company also ruled out artificial intelligence as the cause. "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 a post on X.

The outage specifically affected features connected to Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email and scheduling service. Applications not connected to the affected infrastructure continued operating. Organisations running Microsoft services on their own servers rather than through its cloud infrastructure were relatively less affected.

Global disruption, insurance estimates

Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States reported disruptions. Trading firms experienced delays, some companies had difficulty publishing financial results, and airlines warned customers of possible communication delays.

Ookla, which operates outage-tracking platform Downdetector, said the platform logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, with reports peaking at nearly 20,000 per minute, more than 1,500 times normal levels.

The outage could trigger insurance claims from businesses hit by operational disruptions and financial losses, though the overall impact on insurers is expected to remain limited. Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses at between $300 million and $500 million, according to Reuters. That is below the $400 million to $1.5 billion in financial losses linked to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which crashed more than 8 million Windows-based computers.

Microsoft shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday, leaving the stock up approximately 8% so far this year.

Not the first outage

The incident adds to a list of major technology outages. In July 2024, Microsoft investigated a global technical glitch affecting Outlook, Word, Excel and other Microsoft 365 services, with users reporting connectivity problems. In September 2020, a software bug affected Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Office and Azure cloud services globally. Microsoft attributed that incident to a recent change it was rolling back. In October 2025, an outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted platforms including Snapchat, Canva, Zoom and Slack.

For Nigerian businesses that rely on Microsoft 365 for email, meetings and scheduling, the outage highlights the operational risk of concentrating critical communication tools on a single cloud provider. It also shows why backup channels and business continuity plans matter when global platforms fail.