Microsoft Office 365 and Azure experience widespread outage

Hundreds take to Twitter as Microsoft service page insists 'no known issues'

UPDATE:

Microsoft Office 365 and Azure services now seem to be fully restored. Microsoft has contacted Computing with the following, rather glib, comment attributed to "a Microsoft spokesperson".

"Some customers, particularly those in Europe and the UK, may have been unable to access services earlier today. Services are fully restored and we thank customers for their patience."

ORIGINAL STORY:

Microsoft Office 365 and Azure services are experiencing an international server outage, preventing customers from logging into their email accounts through web browsers.

Affected services seem to be restricted to the Exchange email environment, with login screens refusing to load.

Client-side software-based email Exchange services appear to be functioning largely as normal - though Computing has experienced such phenomena as emails appearing and not opening - but the general suggestion seems to be the issue with Exchange may involve login services as opposed to accessing the mail servers themselves.

Microsoft's "Office 365 health status" page is reporting: "There are currently no known issues preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard."

However, the company's Azure services site is now showing an issue log around Azure Active Directory services affecting multiple regions today:

"Starting at approximately 09:00 on 3rd Dec, 2015, customers began experiencing intermittent issues accessing Azure services that use, or have dependencies on Azure Active Directory," reads the message.

"Engineering teams are actively investigating the root cause of the issue and are developing a mitigation strategy. A list of services reporting impact will be provided shortly. An update will be provided in 60 minutes, or as events warrant."

In other words, this "partial service disruption" lies within Azure, which runs Office 365's login facilities.

Computing has approached Microsoft - a representative of whom acknowleged the problem on a call with us - for comment, and will update the story in due course as and when official words appear.

At the time of writing, Office 365 has been unable to login for around an hour. Reports of inability to log into Azure are also emerging. Reports also suggest extraneous applications such as iOS' Office 365 administration app are not functioning.

Office 365's outage comes just after Microsoft spent the last three days announcing and celebrating impending additions to the Office 365 ecosystem at its Convergence 2015 conference in Barcelona, including plans to introduce Power BI as a native function.

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