Microsoft’s global outage may be worse than Amazon's or CrowdStrike's, expert says

Microsoft is experiencing a widespread cloud crisis following a day-long outage that crippled much of its systems. The issue, which began on Thursday, initially targeted the U.S. and the Americas but soon spread globally. What started as an email and video conferencing problem escalated into a full-blown meltdown, impacting crucial cloud services for both consumer and business email, files, and documents.

The outage also disabled Copilot AI tools, Defender security software, and prevented administrators from accessing internal Intune dashboards and features. Reports suggest some users faced difficulties accessing cloud-based Windows computers.

Microsoft remains unclear on the cause of the outage, stating only that "a large number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable." The company is actively investigating the cause. The incident disrupted a diverse range of industries, including TechCrunch's email. As of Friday morning on the U.S. east coast, Microsoft's Outlook service showed signs of recovery, with emails trickling back in after approximately 18 hours of downtime.

Engineers struggled to identify the root cause behind the failure of servers in Microsoft's data centers.

Despite Microsoft's assurance of no evidence indicating malicious activity in its Friday update, the company may face scrutiny for its slow response to the incident. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to answer questions regarding the company's capability to detect malicious activity or its ability to investigate the incident. The last significant service disruption for Microsoft occurred in September, when a prolonged outage targeted its cloud services, which Microsoft attributed to a "core authentication configuration" issue.