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.
