Microsoft services suffer third outage in 10 days

Microsoft 365 services again suffered a major outage on Wednesday, affecting users in several regions of the United States.

The problem began at about 14:10 EST and prevented users from accessing multiple Office 365 services and Outlook mail, with users complaining about receiving 'Something went wrong' error messages when they tried to access their Microsoft 365 accounts.

Downdetector showed that reports of user impact to Microsoft 365 issue spiked at 14:26.

At 14:48, the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account acknowledged the issue, stating Microsoft IT teams were investigating the cause of the problem.

"Users may see impact to Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook.com," it said.

We're investigating an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 services. Users may see impact to Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and https://t.co/ZUfyjth6sU. More details available at https://t.co/AEUj8uj65N.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) October 7, 2020

The Windows developer later blamed a "recent update to network infrastructure" for the outage.

"Our telemetry indicates continued recovery within the environment following the reversion of the update," the Microsoft 365 Service health status page announced.

Microsoft's Azure cloud was reportedly hit with some issues, suggesting that the two disruptions were connected.

Microsoft later said that its services were recovering, after the recent network update was rolled back to a "healthy configuration".

At 19:05, the company informed users that all affected services were back up and running, except the Admin Center.

"A change was made to an internal service that controls routing across the Azure Wide Area Network (WAN)," it added.

"A bug in the new version of the service caused traffic to route non-optimally across the WAN, causing network congestion and packet loss."

Many users expressed their anger and frustration over continued Office 365 outages on various social media platforms.

"Microsoft is terrible," said a system admin on Reddit. "Email doesn't need 50 million new features. It just needs to work."

This is the third time in about 10 days that Microsoft customers were unable to access Office 365.

In the last week of September, a major outage affected users' access to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Office and Outlook, in several countries, including the US. The company blamed a change in the software for the issue.

Earlier this month, Microsoft cloud users in the UK and elsewhere in Northern Europe complained that they were unable to log into Azure services such as Outlook and Teams.

Service outages impacting cloud providers are fairly common, and can be highly disruptive given the reliance of businesses and individuals on the services.

Last month, a Google outage prevented users from accessing some of the company's tools, including Gmail and cloud-based word processing. YouTube services were also impacted.

Earlier in August, Google users reported problems with accessing Google services including Gmail, Drive and Docs.

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• Topics
• Cloud and Infrastructure
• Azure
• Office 365 services
• Outlook mail
• Microsoft 365 outage