Technology1 min read

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

By · Via TechCrunch · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The incident originated in the Americas before spreading globally to take down Outlook, Teams, Defender security programs, and Copilot AI systems. System administrators found themselves locked out of management portals like Intune dashboards, while some users lost access to cloud-hosted Windows machines entirely. Traffic finally began returning to normal by Friday morning, though Microsoft did not clarify how it ruled out cyberattacks.

Key points

  • Microsoft found no evidence pointing to malicious activity as the underlying cause of the…: Microsoft found no evidence pointing to malicious activity as the underlying cause of the failure.
  • Enterprise operations across multiple industries faced significant work stoppages due to…: Enterprise operations across multiple industries faced significant work stoppages due to lost access to administrative dashboards and cloud-based PCs.
  • The widespread crash follows a separate September cloud breakdown that the company blamed…: The widespread crash follows a separate September cloud breakdown that the company blamed on authentication configuration errors.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

Microsoft is slowly recovering from its day-long outage after much of the company’s systems were hit by a cascading software issue.

The problems, which began Thursday, were initially flagged as affecting the company’s services in the U.S. and the Americas, but quickly spread around the world, as engineers struggled to recover downed servers.

What began as an Outlook email and Teams video conferencing outage soon developed into a full blown meltdown, affecting the company’s cloud services for both consumer and business email, files, and documents. The outage also knocked out the company’s Copilot AI tools, Defender security screening software, and prevented system administrators from accessing their internal Intune dashboards and features. Some users reportedly experienced issues with accessing their cloud-based Windows computers.

Microsoft hasn’t yet said what caused the issues, only saying 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. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment about the incident.

As of Friday morning on the…

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