Microsoft Corp. said access has been fully restored to its flagship software, ending an outage that paralyzed government offices, traders and businesses around the world.

“All products are operational,” according to a service health status update on its website. A “backlog of email messages has been processed, thus this issue is remediated,” it said of its Microsoft 365 services.

That included Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool, whose users experienced missed meeting invitations and unresponsive web pages on Friday. Previous disruptions have rarely lasted more than several hours.

The outage cascaded around the world, with people in more than 70 countries reporting problems, according to Downdetector, which recorded hundreds of thousands of complaints.

Office and government workers from Tokyo to London and New York struggled to adapt, often reaching for analog 20th-century tools like the telephone and, yes, paper. Corporate workers around the U.S. celebrated the Outlook outage as an “adult snow day.” Google Workspace workers, meanwhile, looked on with envy as their Outlook counterparts kicked up their feet.

But their bosses were already counting the costs. Some companies, including Swiss luxury group Richemont and U.S.-based truck and bus manufacturer Workhorse Group Inc., were forced to delay reporting their financial results. Critical services including police departments and hospitals were affected, with the U.K.’s National Health Service rescheduling some procedures, according to people familiar with the matter.

The failure and the time it took to find a fix was a black eye for Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and productivity apps remain critical infrastructure in the age of artificial intelligence. The company’s M365 software bundle has more than 450 million commercial users. Once again, critics highlighted the risks of entrusting so much power to one provider — even as many people understood that unshackling themselves from Microsoft’s ubiquitous products was unlikely anytime soon. Investors largely shrugged off the incident, with Microsoft shares little changed.

“We do not expect the incident to meaningfully change Microsoft’s competitive position in the near term, given the high cost and complexity of replacing deeply embedded productivity workflows,” William Blair & Co. analyst Jason Ader wrote in a note. “Longer term, however, it could make some customers more receptive to alternatives, particularly Google Workspace and emerging productivity offerings from Anthropic unveiled earlier this week.”

The error was introduced during a network capacity upgrade, a spokesperson said. The company’s response, detailed in hourly updates to the company’s status page, described some false starts as Microsoft struggled to pin down the issue.

More than 1,000 engineers and other employees gathered on video calls led by cloud chief Scott Guthrie and Charles Lamanna, who oversees the M365 bundle and other workplace applications. Sessions ran late Thursday and spilled into Friday morning.

Exchange, the digital backbone powering email and calendars in the M365 bundle, would start up on a server and quickly consume its available resources, leading it to become unresponsive. Engineers investigated whether the application was mistakenly firing traffic at databases rather than local memory, according to a person familiar with the matter. Some suspected a misconfiguration in Microsoft’s Azure cloud network could be at fault.

Publicly, Microsoft said it would provide more detail after the disruption was over, adding that there was no evidence of malicious activity. It was also unrelated to AI or agents, a spokesperson said.

“We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us,” Lamanna said in an emailed statement. “Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”

The first signs that Microsoft was experiencing issues came at about 1 p.m. ET Thursday. Reports began spiking on Downdetector, and disgruntled customers took to social media to gripe and say, essentially, “Here we go again.” Many recalled previous outages, including a 15-hour disruption at Amazon Web Services last year that hit hundreds of websites. And few have forgotten the mother of all outages in 2024, when a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.

The latest incident wasn’t so far-reaching, but impactful all the same. PVH Corp., the apparel conglomerate that owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, announced Thursday that it would cut about 4% of its global workforce. But some of the difficult conversations, scheduled to start in Asia on Friday morning, didn’t take place because of the outages, leaving employees uncertain of their future, according to a person familiar with the matters, who requested anonymity to describe private matter. PVH didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Arapahoe County, Colorado, which includes some Denver suburbs, the sheriff’s office couldn’t process online bond payments to release detainees from jail because of missing email traffic. People were asked to post bond in person at the jail instead. In Japan, government ministries resorted to pinning up paper notices to inform journalists about daily schedules.

Lauryn Taylor, an ad sales associate at a U.S. media company, said the outage began around noon on Thursday and continued until she left the office at about 5 p.m. For her, it was a welcome reprieve from the steady stream of emails that typically distracts her from more in-depth work. Because much of her job doesn’t depend on email, she was able to keep working.

“It was kind of nice to have that focused period,” she said.

Some colleagues whose jobs consist almost entirely of email, meanwhile, left the office to take a yoga class.

The outage disrupted more than just office work. Taylor’s mother ran into trouble Thursday while trying to order wings from Wingstop. Uber Eats asked her to verify her email address, but the message never arrived in her Hotmail inbox.

“She was like, ‘What is going on?’” Taylor said. “She thought she had broken her Outlook somehow or something.”

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(With assistance from Nasteho Said, Ainsley Thomson, Valentine Baldassari, Daniele Lepido, Alastair Gale, Maho Nambu and Mayumi Negishi.)

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