Categories: Workspace

Microsoft Office 365 Users Hit By European Outage

An ongoing outage is affecting thousands of Office 365 users across Europe, leaving customers without access to email and web applications as Microsoft seemingly struggles to fix the issue.

Down Detector’s heat map of affected users suggests many in London are among those unable to use Office 365 services this morning.

Office 365 outage

Source: Downdetector.co.uk

However, despite reports from some users on social media of the outage starting around 8.30am GMT, Microsoft has yet to note any issues on its service status page.

TechWeekEurope has contacted Microsoft but has yet to hear a response.

Our offices seem to be unaffected, with the Microsoft Office 365 service page telling us this morning: “There are currently no known issues preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard.”

However, our attempts to click through to the service health dashboard yields a page timeout.

Some users are also taking to Twitter to report an international outage, as well as problems accessing Azure cloud services.

Today’s outage seems similar to Office 365’s failure in July, where thousands of users in the US were left unable to access Exchange email services.

A Microsoft spokesperson has said: “Some customers, particularly those in Europe and the UK, may have been unable to access services earlier today. Services are fully restored and we thank customers for their patience.”

Problems mainly consisted of users being unable to connect to Exchange Online, with emails unable to be sent or received.

Update:

Microsoft has updated users of issues on its Azure cloud status page. The company wrote: “Starting at approximately 09:00 on 3rd Dec, 2015, customers began experiencing intermittent issues accessing Azure services that use, or have dependencies on Azure Active Directory.

“The team is working on failing over the impacted service components to a different environment. Impact is largely centralized to the West Europe and North Europe regions. An update will be provided in 60 minutes, or as events warrant.”

Are you affected? Leave a comment below.

Take our cloud quiz here!

Ben Sullivan

Ben covers web and technology giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft and their impact on the cloud computing industry, whilst also writing about data centre players and their increasing importance in Europe. He also covers future technologies such as drones, aerospace, science, and the effect of technology on the environment.

View Comments

  • We are Office365 reseller partners. Quite a few, but not all, of our customers are affected. Very frustrating for us.

  • School uses Office365. Kids loving it, not able to access their work for last two hours. Staff hate it as they cannot access school systems.

  • for all that they say the cloud is more secure and more reliable. This would suggest otherwise. Like most IT buzz tech/words they have their uses but invariably are found wanting

  • We've been unable to access any of our services since just before 9am. Unbelievable that the update page suggests no issues, hence I spent 67 minutes on hold only to be told I would be called back within an hour. If they had updated the status page or put a message on Twitter, at least we would be aware they knew of the problem. Communication is a wonderful thing....

  • Was due to do a big training course on CRM Online this morning but Murphy's Law kicked in and the training course had to be cancelled due to the spinning wheel of death when logging on to O365. I really wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the Microsoft person/team that made the change that broke everything !

Recent Posts

Craig Wright Sentenced For Contempt Of Court

Suspended prison sentence for Craig Wright for “flagrant breach” of court order, after his false…

2 days ago

El Salvador To Sell Or Discontinue Bitcoin Wallet, After IMF Deal

Cash-strapped south American country agrees to sell or discontinue its national Bitcoin wallet after signing…

2 days ago

UK’s ICO Labels Google ‘Irresponsible’ For Tracking Change

Google's change will allow advertisers to track customers' digital “fingerprints”, but UK data protection watchdog…

2 days ago

EU Publishes iOS Interoperability Plans

European Commission publishes preliminary instructions to Apple on how to open up iOS to rivals,…

3 days ago

Momeni Convicted In Bob Lee Murder

San Francisco jury finds Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder of Cash App founder Bob…

3 days ago