New Delhi [India], November 13 (ANI): Microsoft services began coming back online after a global outage left millions of users without access for nearly 18 hours, disrupting businesses, schools, government agencies, and airline operations across at least 74 countries, including the United States.

Major services impacted during the event included Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot. The disruption also affected airline operations worldwide, prompting major Indian carriers to issue passenger advisories.

According to Microsoft 365 Status (the official Microsoft account for updates on certain Microsoft 365 service incidents), the outage was not caused by a cyberattack. Instead, overwhelmed servers responsible for establishing secure connections failed, preventing them from processing user requests.

In an update posted on X, Microsoft 365 Status detailed the ongoing restoration efforts across various continents.

"We're seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific," Microsoft 365 Status said.

Despite the recovery, the company noted that full stability has not yet returned for everyone.

"Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure," the update added.

"Our focus remains on stabilising recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods," Microsoft 365 Status said.

The outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services for over five hours on Thursday, affecting thousands of users alongside AI service connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic, Reuters reported.

Data from outage-tracking platform Downdetector showed the scale of the user complaints during peak hours. Reports of Outlook outages peaked at 138,058 around 1 pm ET before declining to 34,490 by Thursday evening.

Complaints related to Microsoft 365 fell to nearly 13,000 by 5.47 pm ET, while 763 users reported issues with Teams during that period. (ANI)