Microsoft products are fully operational after a massive outage that left some users unable to access emails and other services for more than 24 hours, the company said 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 said in a post on social media.
The outage was first reported on Thursday and affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services for users across the globe. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
The outage, which Microsoft said was caused by a network strain due to servers suddenly being unavailable, affected governments, hospitals and businesses across the globe.
AI Minister Evan Solomon said the Government of Canada was also impacted.
“Ensuring government digital services are secure, reliable and resilient is a priority and we continually assess our systems and dependencies with that objective in mind,” he said in a statement Friday.
Brett Caraway, associate professor of media economics at the University of Toronto, said there is a lot of convenience that comes out of having a centralized system, “but it also exposes you to a great deal of risk.”
Get breaking National news
Get breaking Canada news delivered to your inbox as it happens so you won’t miss a trending story.
The Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), as well as Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital and Unity Health in Toronto, both said they experienced outages on Thursday, but by Friday services had been restored.
A spokesperson for CHUM said that “there may be an additional delay in processing some appointment requests.”
Officials in the U.K, Australia, India, the Philippines and Japan also said they experienced disruptions.
Downdetector, an online tracker, said it received reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories.
Microsoft apologized for the disruption on Friday and said the outage had nothing to do with AI agents or a cyberattack.
“We know the trust you place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” the company said.
It said the incident “was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced” following a recent network change.
The company said it was monitoring progress Friday before it officially declared the outage over on Saturday morning.
The disruption is yet another example of what can happen when so many communications and technology platforms rely on one company, experts said.
“The fact that Canada basically closed for business because one U.S. company had a glitch on some servers shows how dependent we are, how vulnerable we are,” says Joshua Pearce, who holds the Thompson Chair of Innovation at Western University.
While it’s difficult to know exactly how many people were impacted, Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
– With files from Global News’ Uday Rana and Ariel Rabinovitch and The Associated Press
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
