Microsoft flexes its muscle in Cloud, Office and Windows as quarterly earnings jump

Sales across Microsoft's personal computing business increased 6% to $13.4 billion

- Dan Gallagher & Connor Hart

Microsoft needed a win. Its latest quarterly results and forecast are giving it one. The software titan saw its share price jump 7% in after-hours trading on Wednesday following its fiscal third-quarter report. The report showed strong growth in revenue and earnings across all of the company's business segments, with the closely watched Azure cloud service solidly beating Wall Street's forecasts.

Microsoft's projections for the June-ending quarter were also ahead of analysts' expectations. That should help the company improve its standing with investors who have soured on the stock over the last year on worries about slowing cloud growth combined with blowout spending on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft's share price fell after its previous three quarterly reports, and the stock has lagged all its megacap tech peers over the last 12 months save for Google-parent Alphabet, which has lost two federal antitrust lawsuits in that time.