Microsoft says cyber-attack triggered latest outage

A global outage affecting Microsoft products including email service Outlook and video game Minecraft has been resolved, the technology giant said in an update.

The firm said preliminary investigations show the outage was caused by a cyber-attack and a failure to properly defend against it.

Earlier, the company issued an apology for the incident, which lasted almost 10 hours and caused thousands of users to report issues with Microsoft services.

It comes less than two weeks after a major global outage left around 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, impacting healthcare and travel, after a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.