Microsoft 365 Services Back Up After Hours of Outage That Affected Thousands

Microsoft said on Monday that it had restored its online services after an outage affected thousands of users of its 365 software suite, including Teams and Outlook, for more than two hours.

Access to its productivity software such as Word and Excel was down for nearly 18,000 users at its peak before easing to 906 at around 12:57 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks internet outages.

“We have resolved an issue preventing users from accessing some of our services,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

Microsoft flagged the outage earlier by saying it was investigating an issue with accessing Outlook on the web and later added that Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for business were also impacted.

The tech company said it had rolled back a system update to resolve the outage, without providing any detail.

Several Twitter users complained about the outage and shared the issues faced by them due to the disruption.

Microsoft’s services have been hit by at least three outages since the beginning of the year.

In January, the company was hit with a networking outage that took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook, potentially affecting millions of users globally.

Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit.

An outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure can impact a variety of services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform.

Outages of Big Tech platforms are not uncommon as several companies ranging from Google to Meta have seen service disruptions. Azure, the second largest cloud services provider after Amazon, faced outages last year.

However, with increased dependence on online platforms due to more employees working from home in the last three years any outage has a greater impact. 

© Thomson Reuters 2023