Microsoft experienced a global outage starting Thursday that disabled much of its cloud infrastructure. The incident began with Outlook email and Teams video conferencing but cascaded into a broader meltdown affecting consumer and business email, cloud files, documents, Copilot AI tools, Defender security software, Intune administrator dashboards, and cloud-based Windows computers.
Microsoft said the outage involved "a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable" but has not disclosed the root cause. The company continues investigating. Recovery began Friday morning on the U.S. east coast, with Outlook email service gradually coming back online after approximately 18 hours of downtime, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik.
The outage affected industries globally, including TechCrunch's own email systems. Microsoft stated there was "no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." The company faced questions about its ability to swiftly recover from the outage and did not respond to inquiries about whether it has technical means to detect malicious activity or logs to investigate what occurred.
This marks the second major incident affecting Microsoft cloud services this year. In September, a days-long outage hit Microsoft's cloud services. Microsoft attributed that incident to a "core authentication configuration" issue.