Microsoft on Friday (Nov 13) apologised for a global outage that disrupted public services and businesses around the world, as it reported a “broad recovery” for Outlook email and other services.

The company ruled out any malicious “cyber or AI” activity as the cause of the outage, which affected several Microsoft products and disrupted health care services, delayed corporate earnings reports and left schools struggling to communicate.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said on X, adding full services were still being restored after the outage started on Thursday.

“We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents.”

The disruption knocked out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, affecting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the outage tracker Downdetector.

A top UK trade union said the disruptions had a “serious impact” on the country’s health care service.

National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls were “unable to refer patient details in the normal way,” creating a massive backlog, said Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union.

As the outage dragged on for hours, airlines in India warned that customer queries may not be getting through.

IndiGo and Akasa Air both said on X that their email support services had been affected and that they may not be able to receive customers’ emails.

Immigration New Zealand said the disruption had forced a halt in the processing of all visa applications.