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

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 started 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 U.S. east coast, Microsoft’s Outlook email service had begun to recover and some emails have been trickling in. The recovery comes after engineers initially could not find the cause of the issue that was causing servers in Microsoft’s data centers to fail.

Doug Madory, the 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.

Microsoft said in its latest status update on Friday that there was “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.” That may be some solace for the millions who went without their email and online services yesterday, 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 our questions asking if the company has the technical means to detect malicious activity, such as logs, or if Microsoft has a way to check what happened.

The last major incident affecting Microsoft services was in September, when a days-long outage hit Microsoft’s cloud services. During that outage, Microsoft blamed a “core authentication configuration” issue that prevented users from accessing the service.

This story was first published on November 12 and has been updated throughout.