Microsoft’s latest email outage turned into a full blown global cloud crisis

Microsoft is experiencing a major global cloud crisis following a day-long outage that began on Thursday. The issues, initially affecting services in the U.S. and the Americas, rapidly expanded worldwide as engineers worked to restore downed servers. What started as an email and video conferencing outage spread to encompass the company's cloud services for consumer and business email, files, and documents.

The problem also disabled Copilot AI tools, Defender security software, and prevented administrators from accessing internal Intune dashboards and features. Some users reported difficulties accessing cloud-based Windows computers. Microsoft remains uncertain about the root cause, only noting that "a large number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable."

The company is continuing its investigation. The outage impacted various industries, including TechCrunch's email. Microsoft hasn't yet provided details on the incident. As of Friday morning on the U.S. east coast, Outlook service was recovering, with emails trickling back in after approximately 18 hours of downtime. Microsoft stated in a recent update that there's no evidence of malicious activity linked to the incident.

However, the company may face scrutiny for its slow recovery from an incident of its own creation. A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to answer questions about the company's ability to detect malicious activity or investigate the issue. The most recent major incident affecting Microsoft services occurred in September, when a prolonged outage hit the company's cloud services due to a "core authentication configuration" issue.