Microsoft says its global 365 outage is over after disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services in Canada and abroad
THUNDER BAY – TECH News Service – Microsoft said early Saturday that it had restored service to the remaining customers and regions affected by a global Microsoft 365 outage, ending a disruption that interfered with email, workplace communications and online services in Canada and dozens of other countries.
Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 products were among the affected services. The company said the underlying problem had been addressed, but organizations may still have to work through delayed messages or local backlogs after the restoration.
Microsoft did not publish a verified count of affected users. Downdetector, which relies on user reports, recorded problems in more than 70 countries and territories. The company says more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 applications worldwide.
Company says the disruption was not a cyberattack
Microsoft said it had no indication of malicious activity and that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or artificial-intelligence agents. It traced the incident to a problem introduced during an earlier network-capacity upgrade that surfaced after a later network change.
During the outage, users reported problems connecting to Exchange Online mailboxes and accessing services that depend on Microsoft’s shared cloud infrastructure. Recovery continued in stages through Friday as the company restored capacity and worked through email queues.
The disruption affected businesses and public institutions internationally. In Canada, people and organizations reported intermittent access problems, though no federal agency had published a consolidated national impact assessment by the cutoff.
Post-incident findings still to come
Microsoft has said it will provide a post-incident report with more detail on the cause and measures intended to prevent a repeat. That report was not available at 5:02 a.m. EST Saturday.
Organizations that rely on Microsoft 365 should check their own service-health dashboards and confirm that delayed messages, automated workflows and security tools are operating normally. A global restoration notice does not establish that every local system or queued task recovered at the same moment.
