Microsoft said it had restored full service to its products as of early Saturday, including processing undelivered emails, bringing to a close a widespread outage that had ricocheted around the world.
The latest
Outage tracker Downdetector showed few reported Microsoft outages as of early Saturday morning. "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," Microsoft posted on X.
On its website, the company said all its products were operational, including its Microsoft 365 subscription service for apps such as Teams and Excel that had been widely down. The company also said "the backlog of email messages has been processed."
The context
Downdetector had previously shown hundreds of thousands of users in more than 70 countries reporting problems beginning Thursday and stretching into Friday.
The outages disrupted governments, schools and businesses. Email-deprived entities around the world encouraged customers to reach out via phone, including a water utility in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Detroit's light-rail system; and the East Gippsland region of Australia.
What's next
Insurance payouts to organizations around the world impacted by the outages will likely tally $300 million to $500 million, according to an initial estimate from ratings firm Morningstar DBRS. That is significantly less than the $400 million to $1.5 billion in estimated insured losses from 2024's CrowdStrike outage, Morningstar analysts said.
Some cyber insurance policies cover malicious attacks only, rather than technical issues -- the apparent cause of the Microsoft incident. Insurance broker Marsh said the lost profit for which businesses could file a claim would "likely be minimal," as the loss of email services generally has limited financial impact.
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