Microsoft services recover after global outage lasting about 18 hours

The disruption began Thursday and was first reported in the U.S. and the Americas before affecting users around the world. Microsoft said a “large number of servers” had become unexpectedly unavailable and that it was still investigating the cause. The company has not explained what triggered the cascading software issue.

Along with Outlook email and Teams video calls, the outage affected cloud services used for consumer and business email, files and documents. Copilot AI tools and Defender security screening were also disrupted. System administrators could not access internal Intune dashboards and features, and some users reportedly had trouble reaching cloud-based Windows computers. The problems affected a broad range of industries, including TechCrunch’s email service.

In a Friday status update, Microsoft said there was “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.” A spokesperson did not respond to questions about the technical means available to detect malicious activity, such as logs, or how the company would determine what happened.

The disruption follows a major incident in September, when an outage lasting several days affected Microsoft cloud services. The company then blamed a “core authentication configuration” issue that prevented users from accessing the service. Microsoft’s latest outage raised questions about how quickly it can recover when its own systems fail.