OneDrive outage investigated by Microsoft
Outage left some users unable to login, hacktivist group claims responsibility
Microsoft said Thursday it was investigating a OneDrive outage that left some users unable to access the cloud file storage service.
On Thursday afternoon, a OneDrive sign-in page displayed the message, "Sorry, an error has occurred."
The issue has since been resolved.
It is the second major outage to affect a Microsoft 365 service this week, following issues that affected users of the cloud-based Microsoft productivity and collaboration applications on Monday and again on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Microsoft acknowledged on its service health status website that an unspecified number of OneDrive users "may be unable to access the OneDrive service."
"We've reviewing OneDrive telemetry that captures this impact scenario to determine the source of the service access failures and begin identifying a mitigation plan," Microsoft said on the page.
In an update at 7pm UTC Thursday, Microsoft said it was "continuing to analyse monitoring telemetry and performing load-balancing processes to provide relief."
A subsequent update to the status page Thursday indicated that the outage has only impacted access to OneDrive through a web browser. "Access to the OneDrive service using the desktop client, a synchronization client or Office clients are not impacted," Microsoft said in the update.
A few hours later, Microsoft announced the issue had been resolved. "After extended monitoring of our load-balancing mitigations, we've observed that our service health telemetry remains stable. We'll continue to closely monitor the environment and apply additional mitigations as needed."
Hactivist claims
According to a BleepingComputer report on Thursday, a hacktivist group known as "Anonymous Sudan" has claimed responsibility for causing the OneDrive outage, via a post on Telegram. The group also reportedly said it had carried out DDoS attacks against Microsoft services earlier this week.
"We are aware of these claims and are investigating," Microsoft said in a statement to CRN on Thursday, in response to a question about the hacktivist group's claim. "We are taking the necessary steps to protect customers and ensure the stability of our services."
On Monday, Microsoft said that services including Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were affected by service issues. The following day, the company said it was experiencing a "recurrence of the issue and a drop in service availability."
A version of this article was first published in CRN