Office 365 experiencing 'connectivity issues' across western Europe

Down, down, down again?

Microsoft's Office 365 has been running into problems again, this time experiencing "connectivity issues" across western Europe that saw customers having trouble logging into services for around two hours.

One user on Facebook described an Exchange server "fully down for everyone", with a "few dozen customer companies" calling their IT support firm.

Another commented that switching to OpenDNS from Google DNS seemed to clear up the issue.

Others reported email delivery delays for "several people" in "different locations".

Microsoft finally acknowledged the issue around 10am UK time:

But tweets continued to appear from unhappy customers:

By 12pm, Microsoft reported it had fixed the issues:

There's never a good time for Office 365 to go down, but the day after the company launched an aggressive attempt to dethrone Slack as a collaboration tool with a revitalised version of Microsoft Teams may not be a great one.

Dan Sloshberg, cyber resiliency expert at email security firm Mimecast, said: "For years IT teams have built disaster recovery plans and systems predicated on the belief that IT fails and you always need a plan B. Another Office 365 outage today is a stark reminder that nothing changes in a cloud-first world."