Tech giant Microsoft said on Saturday it has “restored service” to customers, effectively drawing a close to a massive outage that caused chaos and disrupted public services and business around the world.

“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the US-based company said in an X post.

Microsoft had already reported a “broad recovery” for Outlook email and other services the day before, stating the major disruption was due to a technical issue and “not related to cyber or AI/agents”.

The outage swept the globe on Thursday, taking the company’s products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the monitoring site Downdetector.

Microsoft had attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure.

It said the stoppage affected its Outlook email service, as well as Microsoft’s Teams communication platform and the company’s Copilot AI assistant.

Microsoft on Friday apologised for the global outage 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 that full services were still being restored after the outage started on Thursday.