Microsoft announced on Saturday that its services had fully resumed operations, bringing an end to the global outage that lasted more than 24 hours and caused widespread problems for electronic communications at businesses, organizations, and government agencies around the world.
This is one of the longest outages in the company’s history, with serious repercussions for economic activity. According to estimates by Morningstar DBRS, insured losses could reach $500 million, as the outage affected everything from financial transactions to the operation of public services and hospitals.
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Microsoft confirmed that Outlook, Teams, and the other affected services has now been fully restored, as work has been completed for the last remaining customers and regions where issues were still being reported.
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“We have completed our efforts to address the root cause of the incident and have restored service for the remaining customers and regions that were still affected,” the company said in a post on the X platform.
The Financial Cost and Comparison with the CrowdStrike Outage
The financial consequences of the outage are expected to lead to a large number of insurance claims, although the overall burden on the insurance industry is estimated to remain limited.
Mario De Cicco, vice president of the European financial institutions division at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses at between $300 million and $500 million.
The cost, however, is expected to be lower than that of the global blackout caused by CrowdStrike in 2024, which had an estimated economic cost ranging from $400 million to $1.5 billion. That outage had taken more than 8 million Windows computers offline, causing widespread disruption to businesses and services around the world.
Despite the severity of the latest incident, investors did not react strongly. Microsoft’s stock closed Friday virtually unchanged at $523.88, maintaining gains of about 8% since the start of the year.
Over 7.4 million reports of issues
The extent of the disruption is reflected in data from the Downdetector platform, which recorded more than 7.4 million reports of issues worldwide.
According to Ookla, Downdetector’s parent company, reports began to surge around 5:25 p.m. GMT (7:25 p.m. Greek time) on Thursday, and at the peak of the incident, they reached nearly 20,000 per minute—a figure 1,500 times higher than usual levels.
A particularly sharp increase was recorded as the workday began in Asia and Europe, highlighting the extent to which the daily operations of businesses and organizations depend on Microsoft’s services.
“This shows just how much of the workday now depends on email services and collaboration tools from a single provider,” said Luke Kicho, lead analyst at Ookla.
Outlook and Teams are among the most widely used work applications worldwide, with hundreds of millions of users. During the outage, many employees were unable to send emails, manage their calendars, or hold online meetings.
These disruptions had a ripple effect, impacting not only internal business communication but also transactions, customer service, and processes that depend on the seamless operation of electronic systems.
Fax Transactions
The impact was particularly noticeable in the financial sector, where the inability to access key communication applications created problems even in completing transactions.
In Taiwan, the outage affected the operations of brokerage firms, insurance companies, and investment management firms.
One of the companies was forced to cancel a bond buyback transaction, according to a source familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters. Another financial firm even resorted to using fax machines to confirm transactions, as the usual electronic means of communication were unavailable.
Similar problems were reported in Europe. The Euronext stock exchange group reported disruptions in email service, while the British insurance company Aviva activated backup systems for the teleconferences presenting its financial results.
The impact extended to other business sectors as well, with the Danish shipping giant Maersk warning its customers of delays in receiving updates.
The disruption even affected the schedule for releasing financial results. In the U.S., electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the announcement of its results, originally scheduled for Thursday, to November 16.
In Switzerland, the luxury goods group Richemont briefly delayed the release of its first-half results on Friday.
Disruptions to police, hospitals, and airlines
Beyond businesses and financial markets, the outage also affected public services, including organizations with critical responsibilities.
In the United Kingdom, the London Metropolitan Police and the National Health Service (NHS) faced problems.
The inability to access email services and other applications limited the Metropolitan Police’s ability to file certain crime reports electronically. However, its response to calls was not affected.
For its part, the NHS announced that its local services resorted to alternative solutions, such as using other information systems and maintaining paper records, in order to continue operating.
In the aviation sector, the Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air, and Air India reported issues with their email-based customer service.
Disruptions were even reported at the U.S. artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic, which experienced issues connecting their services to Microsoft applications. These issues were subsequently resolved.
In Australia, the organizations affected included the country’s intelligence agency and the federal police.
Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke, stated that Microsoft does not believe the incident was caused by a cyberattack, clarifying that the malfunctions primarily affected email systems.
What Caused the Outage
According to Microsoft, the outage was caused by server issues that affected Exchange Online, the cloud-based email and calendar management service.
Applications that did not rely on these specific functions continued to operate, while organizations that host Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than using the company’s cloud, were affected to a lesser extent.
Microsoft also clarified that it found no evidence of malicious activity and ruled out artificial intelligence as the cause of the outage.
Although the technical issue has now been resolved, the duration and scope of the outage have reignited the debate over the reliability of digital services and the dependence of businesses and public organizations on a limited number of major technology providers.
New Questions About Microsoft’s Reliability
This latest incident adds to a series of problems that have affected Microsoft’s services in recent months.
The company experienced Microsoft 365 outages in January 2026 and October 2025, while last month saw another outage on the Azure platform, affecting productivity applications and businesses across various industries worldwide.
The recurrence of such incidents raises concerns about whether organizations can rely almost exclusively on a single provider’s infrastructure for their day-to-day operations.
“The biggest concern is that this isn’t the first Microsoft 365 outage this year,” said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at the investment platform eToro.
“If reliability starts to become a recurring problem, every IT department will have reason to think twice before entrusting an even larger portion of its business operations to a single provider,” he added.
However, finding alternatives is no simple matter. Some analysts question whether such outages can actually drive businesses toward competing services, as replacing applications that are deeply integrated into their daily operations entails high costs and significant complexity.
Source: skai.gr
