Microsoft faces 18-hour global outage impacting email and cloud services

Microsoft is recovering from a significant global outage that lasted for about 18 hours, impacting its email and cloud services. The issues began on Thursday and quickly expanded from the U.S. and Americas to users worldwide. Engineers faced challenges in restoring downed servers, leading to widespread disruptions across various Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot AI tools.

This incident follows a troubling trend for Microsoft, which has experienced multiple service outages in recent months. The company has not disclosed the specific cause of the latest failure, stating only that a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable. As the investigation continues, many users are left wondering about the reliability of the systems they depend on for both personal and business communication.

The outage affected a wide range of industries, with TechCrunch among those impacted. By Friday morning, some services, particularly Outlook, showed signs of recovery, with emails gradually being delivered. Doug Madory, an expert in internet traffic analysis, noted that traffic to Microsoft’s services had begun to rebound after the downtime. Microsoft confirmed that there was no evidence of malicious activity related to the incident, which may provide some reassurance to users who rely on these tools daily.

Moving forward, Microsoft is under pressure to improve its response to outages. Charles Lamanna, an executive at the company, stated that teams are reviewing the incident to prevent similar occurrences in the future. With the previous major outage occurring just last month due to a core authentication issue, the company’s ability to maintain service reliability is now in the spotlight. Users and industry experts alike will be watching closely to see how Microsoft addresses these challenges.