Microsoft Probes Ongoing Microsoft 365 Outage

In the early hours of yesterday October 13th, some users were unable to access Microsoft 365 apps due to an ongoing issue that Microsoft is looking into.

This persistent problem has been classified as an incident in the admin centre, which is a term usually applied to service problems that have a discernible effect on users, albeit the business has not yet disclosed which regions are impacted.

A service warning that a user was able to access states that Redmond is now analysing telemetry data in order to identify the underlying cause and create a solution.

It’s possible that certain customers won’t be able to use Microsoft 365 apps. When Microsoft first acknowledged the outage on Monday morning at 05:06 AM UTC, the company stated, “It is specific to certain users who are served through the affected infrastructure, trying to access Microsoft 365 apps.” 

Nearly four hours into the event, at 9:00 AM, it said, “We’re continuing to analyse service telemetry alongside recent changes made to the service, to help identify the root cause and define a clear path to resolution.”

Last week, Microsoft 365 was affected by two other significant events that prevented users from accessing a number of services and platforms.

Microsoft resolved an outage on Wednesday that was preventing users from using Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, and the admin centre through Microsoft Entra single sign-on (SSO) login because of problems with Multi-Factor login (MFA).

The company fixed another incident a day later that caused an Azure Front Door content delivery network (CDN) problem to disrupt some Microsoft 365 services for clients in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Exchange Online experienced a global outage in September that prevented users from accessing calendars and emails because of a code error that resulted in frequent database failovers and dismounts, which raised CPU usage.

Microsoft reports that the outage has been reduced as of October 13, 12:22 UTC.

“While we continue to analyse service-side infrastructure logs and service health telemetry to narrow down the source of the impact, we’ve concluded that the impact is no longer occurring,” it continued. “In the event impact persists, please contact one of our support representatives so we can continue our investigation into the problem.”

The company also warned that users connecting through the impacted infrastructure would have trouble accessing Microsoft 365 apps in a service alert.

A slew of recent Microsoft problems preceded the most recent one. Microsoft is still looking into the issue and working to fully restore services, but they have not given an estimated time of completion.