Microsoft's global cloud crisis spreads from email to security tools

Outage starts in Americas, spreads globally

Microsoft's systems were hit by a cascading software issue starting Thursday. Problems initially flagged as affecting U.S. and Americas services quickly spread worldwide as engineers struggled to recover downed servers.

Email, Teams, and security tools all went down

The outage began with Outlook email and Teams video conferencing, then expanded to cloud services for consumer and business email, files, and documents.

Microsoft blames large number of unavailable servers

Microsoft said the outage involved a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable but has not disclosed the root cause.The company said it continues to investigate.

“a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable”

Recovery begins after 18 hours of downtime

As of Friday morning on the U.S.east coast, Outlook email had begun to recover and some emails were trickling in.

Microsoft rules out malicious activity

Microsoft said in its latest status update on Friday that there was no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident.

“no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident”

Second major outage in three months

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