Microsoft has managed to restore the operation of its main cloud services after a global outage that affected companies, public administrations and millions of users in more than 70 countries, generating incidents in Outlook, Teams and in its AI assistant Copilot, according to what the agency Bloomberg has reported.
The technology company has said that all its applications are working normally again and that the emails that were held back during the outage have already been processed. "All products are operational", it indicated in a statement cited by the same agency, in which it also confirms that the incident is considered closed.
According to the first internal conclusions, the cause of the failure would be tied to an update related to network capacity. Microsoft has denied that it is a cyberattack or a problem arising from the use of artificial intelligence. More than 1,000 engineers and other employees took part in the recovery tasks, under the coordination of the teams responsible for the cloud services and of the Microsoft 365 suite.
Preliminary investigations point to Exchange as one of the focuses of the incident, since its activity quickly saturated the servers’ resources until they stopped responding. Among the hypotheses analyzed was a possible incorrect configuration in the Azure network. The scope of the failure has made itself felt across multiple economic sectors and in different types of organizations.
According to Bloomberg, the first alerts about the outage began to be recorded around 1:00 p.m. on Thursday on the East Coast of the United States. From that moment on, reports surged on Downdetector, the platform that monitors in real time the status of web pages, applications and online services, where hundreds of thousands of problem notifications were reached.
The incident has been a setback for Microsoft, whose M365 package has more than 450 million corporate users worldwide. Despite this, the reaction of the stock market was limited and the behavior of its shares showed only minimal significant variations.
Along the same lines, analysts consulted by Bloomberg consider that the drop will not substantially alter, at least in the short term, the multinational’s competitive position, due to the high cost and complexity that would be involved for companies in replacing their tools. However, they point out that the episode could boost some clients’ interest in alternatives such as Google Workspace or Anthropic’s new productivity proposals.
From the company, they have expressed their regret for the consequences of the disruption and have committed to thoroughly review what happened in order to minimize the risk of it happening again. "We know that our customers rely on our services to carry out important tasks every day, and we regret the impact that these outages have had on those who trust us," said the head of the Microsoft 365 package, Charles Lamanna, after the incident became known.