Microsoft fails to restore services after more than 12 hours of global disruption

Microsoft was still working to restore services after a global outage lasting more than 12 hours, disrupting email, workplace tools and cloud products. A senior executive said there was no indication of a cyberattack, while the company reported some improvement from traffic-management measures but had not achieved a lasting recovery.

Reports of problems began on Thursday evening and were recorded in more than 70 countries; a second wave on Friday morning was twice as large by reported volume. Businesses and public services, including Australian tax authorities and some courts, faced operational difficulties, while Japan’s government reported communications problems but no healthcare incidents. Microsoft said unavailable servers had shifted workloads to others, creating a chain reaction; its Microsoft 365 services have more than 450 million corporate users and 95 million individual customers.