Microsoft apologised for a global outage affecting 74 countries, reporting a "broad recovery" of its services.

Microsoft apologised for a global outage affecting 74 countries, reporting a "broad recovery" of its services and confirming that the disruption was caused by a "technical issue not related to cyber or AI" activity.

Microsoft said the outage was traced to an issue that emerged during an earlier network capacity upgrade and was triggered after a more recent network change. It said recovery was deliberately carried out in stages rather than through a single large-scale restart.