Microsoft's Email Outage Escalates into a Global Cloud Crisis
Microsoft is gradually recovering from a day-long outage after a cascading software issue disrupted much of the company's infrastructure.
Outage Spreads Worldwide
The problems began on Thursday and were initially flagged as affecting Microsoft services in the U.S. and the Americas. They quickly spread around the globe, however, as engineers struggled to restore downed servers.
What started as an Outlook email and Teams video conferencing outage soon developed into a full-blown meltdown. The disruption affected the company's cloud services for both consumer and business email, files, and documents. It also knocked out Microsoft's Copilot AI tools and Defender security screening software, and prevented system administrators from accessing their internal Intune dashboards and features. Some users reportedly experienced issues accessing their cloud-based Windows computers.
Cause Still Under Investigation
Microsoft has not yet said what caused the issues, stating only that the outage involved "a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable." The company said it continues to investigate the cause.
The outage affected a broad range of industries, including TechCrunch's own email. TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
Recovery Begins After 18 Hours
As of Friday morning on the U.S. East Coast, Microsoft's Outlook email service had begun to recover, with some emails starting to trickle in. The recovery came after engineers initially could not identify the cause of the server failures in Microsoft's data centers.
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that monitors internet traffic worldwide, said in a post on Bluesky that traffic was returning to Microsoft's services after about 18 hours of downtime.
No Evidence of Malicious Activity
In its latest status update on Friday, Microsoft said there was "no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." That may offer some solace to the millions who went without their email and online services on Thursday, but the company is likely to face questions about its inability to swiftly recover from an outage of its own making.
A Microsoft spokesperson did not respond to questions asking whether the company has the technical means to detect malicious activity.
Image Credits: Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP / Getty Images
via TechCrunch