Microsoft Cloud Services Outage Hits Office 365, Outlook

Microsoft suffered an outage of its cloud-based offices services on Monday evening, that impacted Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Office.

Some users were unable to log into Microsoft’s cloud-based offerings for three hours, due to a reported botched upgrade. The outage across a range of Microsoft services was noted on the Downdetector.com website.

Microsoft blamed the outage on a “recent change”, which is code for some type of upgrade or other system change, that brought its services down.

Cloud outage

The outage occurred between 2125 UTC and 0023 UTC, although problems continued to be flagged in the early hours of Monday morning.

Microsoft took to Twitter to explain the outage.

“We’ve identified a recent change that appears to be the source of the issue,” said Redmond. “We’re rolling back the change to mitigate impact.”

However that rollout was not without issues and it took a few hours before people around the world could begin logging into their Microsoft services again.

At 3am UTC, Microsoft reported the services were mostly restored, but small subset of customers in North America and Asia were still unable to access services.

“We’ve confirmed that the residual issue has been addressed and the incident has been resolved,” Microsoft later tweeted. “Any users still experiencing impact should be mitigated shortly.”

Outages like these are especially difficult for staff and people working remotely during the global Coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier this month access to Google Drive for US users was disrupted for a number of hours, which was particularly problematic for school pupils and teachers in the United States, who were returning to remote school work.