Microsoft has restored services to customers affected by a widespread technical outage that disrupted its email, communication and artificial intelligence platforms across at least 74 countries and territories.

The technology company announced on Saturday that it had resolved the underlying problem and restored service to customers and regions that were still experiencing disruptions.

The outage began on Thursday and affected several Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.

Microsoft had earlier said its systems were experiencing an “elevated load”, which contributed to the disruption. The company also ruled out a cyberattack or problems linked to its artificial intelligence agents as the cause of the incident.

The disruption was recorded across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to global outage-monitoring platform Downdetector.

Microsoft said it had achieved broad recovery for Outlook and other affected services on Friday, before completing the restoration process on Saturday.

The outage disrupted access to tools widely used by businesses, organisations and public institutions, highlighting the potential impact of failures affecting major cloud and digital service infrastructure.

The company said it had completed efforts to address the technical issue and restore normal operations to all remaining affected customers and regions.