Microsoft had said the issue was fixed earlier in the week
Users of Microsoft's cloud in the UK and elsewhere in Northern Europe are unable to log into Azure services such as Outlook and Teams this morning. The latest outage follows one that Microsoft said it had fixed on Monday (see below). That outage primarily affected US users whereas, according to downdetector.com, this one is centred on the UK.
The latest problems seem to have commenced around 5am BST. On Twitter Microsoft says its engineers are looking into the issues.
Thank you for flagging this with us, the engineering team is aware and is actively investigating. More information can be found in the admin center under EX223208. We apologize for the inconvenience.
— Microsoft Outlook (@Outlook) October 1, 2020
Microsoft fixes outage that affected Office 365, Teams and Azure users worldwide [Sept 29]
Microsoft is currently investigating an outage that brought down its cloud-based office services in many countries around the world on Monday.
According to the company, the outage was caused by a recent change in the software, affecting users' access to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Office and Outlook.
After the issue emerged, users who tried to log into the systems were unable to connect, the company said, although those already logged into an existing O365 session were not affected.
The outage was "non-regional" and affected services worldwide, according to Microsoft.
"We've determined that a specific portion of our infrastructure is not processing authentication requests in a timely manner," the company said.
"We're pursuing mitigation steps for this issue. In parallel, we're re-routing traffic to alternate systems to provide further relief to the affected users."
Many users complained on Twitter that they could miss their job interviews and deadline for college assignments due to the outage.
According to Microsoft, the problems with Azure started at around 9:21 pm GMT on Monday and impacted the public cloud as well as the company's government cloud customers.
Within an hour, more than 18,000 reports of problems had flooded the downdetector.com website, which tracks internet outages.
The software giant linked the Office 365 issue to a recent upgrade, and said it was restoring the software to an earlier version. However, the initial measure did not appear to have worked, with no observed increase in successful connections.
Nearly 2 hours later, Microsoft said the situation had improved after additional mitigation solutions were put in place.
At 3am GMT, the company reported that a small number of customers in Asia Pacific and North America were still unable to access services. It said at 4am GMT that the issue was fully resolved.
"We've confirmed that the residual issue has been addressed and the incident has been resolved. Any users still experiencing impact should be mitigated shortly," the company stated.
We've confirmed that the residual issue has been addressed and the incident has been resolved. Any users still experiencing impact should be mitigated shortly. Additional details can be found in the admin center under MO222965 or https://t.co/lbjX5iaxCX
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 29, 2020
Service outages impacting cloud providers are not uncommon, although this was a relatively lengthy one, but they can be highly disruptive given the reliance of businesses and individuals on the services. Last week, search giant Google was hit with an outage that impacted users' ability to use some of Google's tools, including Gmail and cloud-based word processing. YouTube services were also impacted in the 20-minute outage.
Earlier in August, users around the world reported problems with accessing Google services including Gmail, Drive and Docs.
IBM Cloud also suffered a widespread outage in June that brought down multiple services hosted on the platform, as well as IBM's own cloud status page.
