Microsoft outage brings down Office 365, Outlook and Teams for users around the world

AP
Sean Morrison @seanmorrison_29 September 2020

Microsoft has said it is investigating an outage that brought down its cloud-based office services worldwide.

The firm reported issues with authentication for its cloud services, with users having issues logging into the likes of Teams, Outlook and Office.

It said a recent change it introduced likely caused a major outage, affecting users’ access to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook.com and Microsoft Teams.

The outage had affected services all over the world.

The developer of Windows and Office software said it did not “observe an increase in successful connections” even after it rolled back the change to mitigate the impact.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, services like Teams have been vital for people to continue to work from home.

Several Twitter users complained that the outage meant they could miss their job interviews and deadline for college assignments.

The Xbox maker also said they were working to evaluate other solutions while they investigate the root cause of the outage.

Microsoft said people who were logged into an existing 365 session were still able to keep using the service.

“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.”

Agencies contributed to this report

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