Office 365 suffers European outage due to 'high resource utilisation'

So - lag, basically

UPDATE:

Microsoft has issued Computing with the following statement, attributed to "a Microsoft spokesperson":

"A limited number of customers in Europe may have intermittent access to email on mobile devices, or intermittent delays accessing the portal, and we're working to resolve both as quickly as possible," said the spokesperson, curiously focusing only on mobile when, to Computing's knowledge, a number of types of device were affected.

"Customers can access email via Outlook client or Outlook on the web and can visit the O365 Service Health Dashboard for updates," the spokesperson said.

ORIGINAL STORY:

Office 365 is experiencing a European outage, marking the second time in three months that Microsoft's critical enterprise systems are unavailable for a sustained period.

The company has been quoted as attributing the problems to "high resource utilisation".

Many users are unable to log into Office 365 through its front-end portal, resulting in perpetual lag, while the website promising that technicians are "working on it". If users are able to log in to services - for example Outlook - they are experiencing further lag inside the service environment when trying to open emails.

Office 365 seems to have been inaccessible by those affected since around 9am this morning.

Microsoft has made no formal announcement as yet, but Computing has been informed by a contact in the tech support industry that the company is blaming the problems on "high resource utilisation".

Users on Twitter are reporting "multiple customers experiencing outages", and accusing Microsoft of "fix[ing] one thing and breaking another" .

Computing has contacted Microsoft for a statement, and will update this story as and when we get one.

Office 365's last major outage took place on 3 December 2015, and also included Azure services. It lasted around four hours, and cloud email management firm Mimecast warned at the time that continued outages could begin to have "a detrimental impact on the country".

A further outage took place on 18 December 2015, and was attributed more directly to Microsoft's Azure functions.