Another Microsoft Office 365 and Azure outage hits UK and Europe

"There now needs to be an expectation of outage, rather than uptime" comments Mimecast

Microsoft Office 365 and Azure have experienced an outage today, with hundreds of UK and European customers unable to log into email or access Azure-hosted websites.

The problem seems similar to the faults Computing reported on back on 03 December, with users experiencing problems with login portals to their email or cloud content. The problems began to arise from around 10am UK time this morning.

Microsoft's Azure status page currently reads:

"Starting as early as 18 Dec, 2015 00:00 UTC a subset of customers using Virtual Machines and App Service \ Web App in West Europe may experience issues accessing their services. WebApp customers may experience intermittent timeouts or 503 errors when connecting to their Websites.

"Virtual Machine customers may experience issues accessing existing Virtual Machines, or performing Service Management functions (Create, Delete, etc.). Engineers are continuing to investigate a potential underlying storage issue. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes, or as event warrant."

As last time - despite the problems affecting Office 365 directly - Microsoft's Office 365 status page has continued making positive noises, saying, "there are currently no known issues preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard".

An industry contact of Computing who logged back into their firm's Office 365 admin portal after the outage was delivered a message inferring the outage was corrected by a failover process at Microsoft, and officially ended at "11.25 AM UTC".

"Final Status: Engineers have confirmed that the failover has remediated the issue. Some customers have reported successful validation," read the message.

"User Impact: Affected users were unable to sign in to the Office 365 portal. The Office 365 services remained unaffected throughout this event.

"Customer Impact: Analysis of incident scope indicated that many customers appeared to be impacted by this event. However, those customers affected likely had a small number of users experiencing impact. Some customers reported that their organization was affected by this issue.

Incident Start Time: Friday, December 18, 2015, at 9:20 AM UTC

Incident End Time: Friday, December 18, 2015, at 11:25 AM UTC"

The "preliminary root cause" of the episode was, said Microsoft, "a portion of capacity that facilitates access to the portal became degraded."

At the time of writing - 1.30pm in the UK - European users on Twitter are still reporting outages on Office 365, however, so system administrators are advised to take the 11.25 AM statement with a pinch of salt.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Computing: "Some customers in West Europe may be experiencing connectivity issues with some services and the team is working on a resolution," before advising consulting the Azure health dashboard , as already linked above.

Cloud email management and continuity firm Mimecast provided comment from cyber security specialist Orlando Scott-Cowley:

"Office 365 took another hit today in Europe. There now needs to be an expectation of outage, rather than the expectation of uptime," Scott-Cowley told Computing.

"Initial analysis appears to show that the Office 365 portal was struck by systemic dependencies. This follows the recent outage where Azure's Active Directory authentication affected the email service."

"Email is the lifeblood of most daily business activities and organizations absolutely must take protecting it seriously. Relying on just a single cloud service without appropriate failover is a doomed business strategy."