Microsoft restores service after outage hit 74 countries
Microsoft said it has restored service to the last affected customers and regions, closing an outage that took its products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the monitoring site Downdetector.
The company attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure and said it was "not related to cyber or AI/agents." Outlook email, the Teams communication platform and the Copilot AI assistant were all affected, Microsoft said.
In a post on X, Microsoft said: "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions." It had reported a "broad recovery" for Outlook and other services the day before.
Microsoft also warned on Saturday of an "active phishing campaign" exploiting the disruption. The fake emails, detected on Friday, imitated its service notifications and told users that messages blocked during the outage would be deleted unless they clicked to restore them.
Users should treat any such message as fraudulent, the company's warning implies, and verify service status through official Microsoft channels rather than links in unexpected emails.
What it means for Pakistan: Pakistani businesses and public offices that rely on Outlook, Teams and Copilot for email and internal communication were among the users exposed to the disruption, and the phishing warning applies to them too: fake Microsoft notices asking users to click to recover blocked messages are circulating. Staff should verify any such email through official Microsoft channels before clicking, and organisations using these services should treat unexpected outage-related messages as suspect.
