Microsoft Looks Into Copilot & Office.com Outages

At a late hour yesterday, Microsoft claimed to be looking into a persistent problem that keeps people in North America from using Office.com and the company’s AI-powered assistant, Copilot.

Earlier in the day user complaints on DownDetector indicate that this issue started affecting Microsoft’s services over two hours ago and is still creating problems with server connections and account login.

As at yesterday, at the time when downdetector detected this outage, this was what was capture

And as at now, here is the outcome which is under monitoring according to Microsoft and downdetector.

Some users’ attempts to access Office.com and m365.cloud.microsoft are specifically affected. Microsoft stated in a new service notice posted on the Microsoft 365 admin centre that “the full scope of impact is still under investigation, although the majority of reports are from users located in the North America region.” The above chart shows the percentages of users from North American region.

To determine the underlying cause of the outage and try to replicate the problem in order to find a solution, the firm is currently gathering telemetry data.

“Service telemetry from components that support Office.com functionality is still being reviewed. We’re trying to imitate the problem internally in parallel to collect more network diagnostics,” it continued.

Customers can still use other ways to access Copilot while this ongoing issue is resolved, including:

• Microsoft.com/copilot or copilot.microsoft.com
• For the Microsoft 365 app, Microsoft Copilot,
• Office Apps and Microsoft Teams are among the Microsoft 365 apps.

This incident has been categorised as a significant service issue (recorded under MO1138499 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre), which usually entails noticeable user impact, however the business is still looking into whether regions are affected.

Additionally, Microsoft released a solution this week for a known bug that causes “couldn’t connect” problems when the Microsoft Teams desktop and online apps are launched.

Two months prior, the business resolved another incident that affected customers in the Asia Pacific (APAC) and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regions by causing problems with specific Microsoft 365 authentication features.

The team acknowledged discovering a particular configuration modification that went into effect around the same time we first heard about its effects. As a possible mitigating measure, we’re rolling back the update out of extreme caution,” the business stated.

“Additionally, we’re continuing to analyse network traces, authentication flows and Content Delivery Network (CDN) interactions to determine the root cause.”

Update August 21, 02:23 EDT: Microsoft stated the issue was fixed six hours into the outage and instructed impacted clients to refresh their web browsers.

“We have verified that the impact has been eliminated for every user after completing the reversion throughout the impacted infrastructure. It stated that users might need to restart their browsers in order to feel better.