Microsoft says it restored cloud services after outage but 'blue screen of death' persists for many

Microsoft's cloud services have been restored after an outage, the company said on Friday, but many users are still reporting issues.

It comes as cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike also suffered a major outage resulting from an issue with its latest update, the company told NBC. CrowdStrike is now in the process of rolling back that update globally.

It is not clear whether Microsoft's initial issues — which it said affected its Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps in the central U.S. region — were directly related to the CrowdStrike update. On Friday, Microsoft said the majority of its services were recovered.

However, the update issue at CrowdStrike does appear to have directly affected Windows systems globally, with laptops showing an error screen known as the "blue screen of death."

In an update at 3:55 a.m. ET, Microsoft 365 said on social platform X: "Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress."

In January, Microsoft cloud suffered an outage globally that impacted services from Outlook to Teams. At the time, Microsoft said this was due to a network change.