Microsoft experienced a major outage on most of its apps. Reports confirm MS Teams, Ofice 365 services, and Outlook—among others—were critically hit.
The Microsoft outage happened on Monday, CNN confirms. Nonetheless, by late evening the official 365 Twitter support account confirms that the “incident has been resolved.”
What happened and the affected services
The Guardian reports that Microsoft initially reported the issues around 9:25 p.m. UTC. Such issues generally affected the authentication of the tech giant’s cloud services.
This meant that the users, mostly from the United States, encountered logging-in issues with Microsoft’s online services such as the Office 365, Outlook, and video-conference app, MS Teams.
On a series of tweet updates, per TechCrunch, the company exhausted all fixes but “was forced to roll back its changes after the fix failed.”
“We’ve rolled back the change that is likely the source of impact and are monitoring the environment to validate that service is recovering,” one of the tweets read.
We've identified a recent change that appears to be the source of the issue. We're rolling back the change to mitigate impact. Please follow https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl for updates on this issue if you are unable to access the admin portal.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 28, 2020
Around 5:40 p.m. PT, after the support team announced they’ve seen “improvement for multiple services,” users both on the west coast of the United States and Australia were still struggling to access Microsoft’s online services.
Per CNN the affected services were:
- Office.com
- Power Platform
- Dynamics365
- Microsoft Teams including Teams Live Event
The news publication cites Down Detector reporting Office 365 was indeed having some logging in issues.
Nonetheless, Microsoft does not believe that the outage was brought by some malicious activities. In a statement to CNN, the company says, “at this time, we’ve seen no indication that this is the result of malicious activity.”
Instead, it is strongly believed that the outage was caused by a recent update.
So far, Microsoft assures that they’ve identified and resolved the issue.
911 system affected as well?
Meanwhile, amid the sudden outage, NBC New York narrates that the nationwide 911 system was also down.
Law enforcement from cities and counties in at least four states in America reported the same issue that went on for about an hour.
ECN can confirm there is a multi-state 911 outage affecting Minnesota at this time. To call 911, please use the 10-digit 24-hour number associated with your county's 911 center: https://t.co/6rhRGUMfTX. pic.twitter.com/qtKf82F8VV
— Minnesota ECN (@MnDPS_ECN) September 29, 2020
The media outlet notes, “[l]aw enforcement agencies around the country, from Nevada to Pennsylvania and Arizona to Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 systems were down beginning sometime after 7 p.m. ET. Multiple reports indicated outages throughout Delaware and Ohio as well.”
As of this writing, it is yet to be determined whether the Microsoft incident is linked to the 911 outage. Although the NYPD believes the incidents might be likely linked together.
Nonetheless, the 911 systems went back online around the same time Microsoft resolved its issue.
Featured image courtesy of Mika Baumeister/Unsplash