Microsoft has announced the full restoration of its services, ending an outage that lasted more than 24 hours and caused serious disruption to businesses, financial institutions, government services and organisations around the world. The failure affected core applications such as Outlook and Teams, as well as other Microsoft services, causing major difficulties with email, task management and the processing of transactions. “We’ve completed our efforts to address the underlying cause of the incident,” the company said in a post on X, adding that it had restored service to the last customers and regions still affected.
Losses in the hundreds of millions
The incident ranks among the longest outages in Microsoft’s history, and Morningstar DBRS estimates that insured losses could range between $300 million and $500 million. Mario De Cicco, vice-president for European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, said insured losses could reach up to $500 million worldwide. Despite their size, the consequences for the insurance sector are expected to be smaller than those of the global CrowdStrike outage in 2024, when the estimated cost ranged from $400 million to $1.5 billion and more than 8 million Windows computers were knocked offline. Microsoft’s share price was largely unaffected, closing almost unchanged at $523.88 on Friday.
The scale of the outage is reflected in data from Downdetector, which logged more than 7.4 million problem reports from users worldwide. According to Ookla, the platform’s parent company, reports began rising sharply at around 5.25pm GMT on Thursday and peaked at almost 20,000 a minute, about 1,500 times normal levels. The biggest surge came as the working day began in Asia and Europe. Many users were unable to send or receive emails, manage their calendars or join online meetings. Luke Kehoe, a lead analyst at Ookla, said the incident showed how much of everyday work now depends on the email and collaboration services of a single provider.
Banks, police and hospitals affected
The financial sector was hit particularly hard, as the lack of access to standard communication tools made it difficult to complete transactions. In Taiwan, brokerages, insurers and fund managers reported problems, with one company forced to cancel a bond buyback and another resorting to fax to confirm trades. In Europe, stock exchange group Euronext and British insurer Aviva were affected, with Aviva switching to backup systems to hold conference calls on its financial results. Shipping group Maersk warned customers of possible communication delays. The outage also disrupted earnings releases, with US-based Workhorse Group postponing its results to 16 November and Swiss group Richemont briefly delaying the presentation of its figures.
In the United Kingdom, London’s Metropolitan Police and the NHS were affected. The police were unable to process some online crime reports normally, though their response to emergency calls was not affected, while the NHS said local services switched to alternative IT systems and paper records to keep operating. In aviation, Indian carriers IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India warned customers of problems with online communication and customer service. Disruption was also reported at artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic, while in Australia the federal police and the country’s intelligence service were among those affected.
No sign of a cyberattack
Microsoft attributed the failure to technical problems with its servers, which affected functions of Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and calendar service. The company said it had found no evidence of malicious activity, ruling out a cyberattack. Organisations running services on their own servers rather than Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure were less affected.
The incident has revived concerns about the dependence of businesses and public bodies on a small number of technology providers. Microsoft has faced other outages, with problems affecting Microsoft 365 in October 2025 and January 2026, as well as disruptions to its Azure platform. Josh Gilbert, an analyst at investment platform eToro, said that if the reliability of Microsoft’s services becomes a recurring problem, corporate IT departments will have reason to reconsider relying on a single provider for an ever larger share of their operations. Switching to alternatives is no simple matter, however, as replacing applications at the core of a company’s daily operations involves significant cost and technical difficulty.
