Seoul, Nov 14 (IANS) The ICT ministry here said on Saturday it will inspect disruptions to domestic companies' operations following a global outage of tech giant Microsoft's services.

Microsoft 365 services experienced disruptions earlier this week, with some companies in the country reporting difficulty accessing their emails on Friday.

The Ministry of Science and ICT said it plans to check the restoration of the company's services and possible damage to users in South Korea by working with Microsoft Korea, reports Yonhap news agency.

It added that it will form a joint emergency response team with the company to continue monitoring the situation.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has restored its services -- ending a worldwide disruption that affected Outlook, Teams and several other Microsoft 365 applications used by businesses and consumers for more than a day.

The tech company updated its service status page, which shows "all products are operational", after users across multiple countries experienced difficulty accessing email, virtual meetings and cloud-based workplace tools since Thursday.

The incident originated from a technical issue linked to a previous network capacity upgrade that was exposed following a later network change, according to the company.

It also stated that the outage was not related to cyber threats or artificial intelligence systems. "We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said in a post on social media platform X, adding that it takes customers' trust in its services extremely seriously.

According to the company, the issue primarily affected Exchange Online, the company's cloud email platform, with knock-on effects spreading to dependent services including Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Defender XDR.

Users reported difficulties accessing calendars, scheduling meetings and retrieving information through Copilot during the outage. Microsoft's assessment of the problem evolved as its investigation progressed.

--IANS

na/