Microsoft’s latest email outage turned into a full blown global cloud crisis

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1:42Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Let's learn how Microsoft's latest email outage turned into a full-blown global cloud crisis. I'm Imran Shaikh, and did you get that email I sent you? Never mind, here's your Weekend Crunch featuring three big tech headlines starting right now. Uber's notifying thousands of drivers that their personal and driver's license information was stolen during an October data breach at one of the company's tech providers. In notices filed this week with several U.S.

2:22attorneys general, including California, the ride-hail giant said it was notified on October 9th by the provider that hackers broke in and stole internal credentials, which were used to access Uber's data. The company said it subsequently began notifying affected drivers that their personal info was stored with the provider. TechCrunch has learned that the provider is Fireworks AI, which lets developers access and use OpenAI models. Fireworks reported a data breach last month in which hackers stole its customers' info, including billing data and some private AI datasets. Online productivity startup Notion confirmed its data was also stolen in the Fireworks hack.

3:00Uber didn't say how many customers are affected by the breach, nor how many drivers it was notifying about the incident. A spokesperson for Fireworks did not respond to questions about the incident. According to data breach notices seen by TechCrunch, The stolen data includes driver's licenses of 2 ,567 individuals in Massachusetts, 3 ,430 people across South Carolina, and 1 ,873 residents of Rhode Island. A filing with Illinois showed that some state residents had their driver's license information stolen, but that the number of affected people was pending. Uber also notified drivers who live in California, but did not say how many had their info stolen.

3:40The number is expected to rise as more data breach notifications roll in. No known cyber criminal group has taken credit for the data theft. Former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang described Colette Kress, the company's CFO who has now replaced him as interim CEO, as a, quote, deer in the headlights, unquote, during a presentation earlier in the summer, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an anonymous source. Now, Wang made the comment during a meeting with NVIDIA's finance team about the company's plans to provide guarantees worth billions of dollars to data center operators that couldn't afford to buy its chips up front, according to the report.

4:19He reportedly also said Kress was a person who couldn't help him steer strategy or decision making. Kress has been with NVIDIA for over 13 years now after serving as senior vice president and CFO of Cisco's business technology operations finance. The report said she has questioned NVIDIA's program-focused, credit-based deals involving Wang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez, and wanted to know how to decide which deals are beneficial, how to value guarantees, and determine returns. Earlier in the year, she had scaled back on NVIDIA's commitment for OpenAI's ambitious Ohio Data Center project. The company was in talks to provide$250 billion in credit to OpenAI, but ended up committing$105 billion.

5:01dollars. Wang resigned Thursday after reports of two extramarital affairs, including one with the VP for health care, Kimberly Powell. Oh, and the company is also investigating a possible Chinese espionage plot. After his resignation, Reuters reported that he was having a third affair with another employee. NVIDIA is currently searching for a permanent CEO to replace Wang, who had the top job for over 33 years. 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.

5:41and 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 co-pilot 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.

6:16Microsoft 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. Now, the outage affected a broad range of industries, including TechCrunch's own email. We've reached out to Microsoft to 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. The recovery comes after engineers initially could not find the cause of the issue that was causing servers in Microsoft's data centers to fail.

6:51Microsoft said in its latest status update on Friday that there was no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. That may be some solace for the millions who went without their email and online services yesterday, but the company is likely to face questions about its inability to swiftly recover from an outage of its own making. The last major incident affecting Microsoft services was in September, when a days-long outage hit Microsoft's cloud services. During that outage, Microsoft blamed a core authentication configuration issue that prevented users from accessing the service.

7:27And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories are reported by Zach Whitaker, Ivan Mehta, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here next week, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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