AI Summary

A widespread outage knocked Microsoft 365 services offline for businesses, governments and tens of millions of users worldwide. The disruption began around Thursday lunchtime on the U.S. East Coast, with Outlook problems reported on Downdetector just after 12 p.m. ET. Within an hour Microsoft announced it was investigating the issue, initially describing it as limited to North America, but the problem quickly expanded to affect more than 70 countries. According to the company’s status page, the essential cloud services are now mostly restored.

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