[Update] Microsoft 365 Services Hit With Another Outage Causing Connectivity Issues

Office 365

Microsoft Outlook went down for almost 8 hours on Monday, along with Teams, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and other Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft confirmed on Twitter this morning that the problem has popped up again.

In a Reddit thread, several Microsoft 365 users reported that the first outage started hitting organizations at around 10:00 ET on Monday. The reports on various social media platforms suggest users could not access emails or other Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft rolled back the problematic update that caused the technical problem and reported a service improvement.

However, Microsoft 365 services were hit again just after a couple of hours. Microsoft acknowledged the second outage in a tweet at around 16:15 ET and deployed a fix within three hours. Downdetector indicates that the first outage affected around 18,000 users at the peak of the problem. Meanwhile, the website reported more than 5,000 complaints from customers impacted by the second glitch at its peak.

Unfortunately, Microsoft 365 apps and services are facing issues again today. Microsoft first acknowledged the issue at 05:06 ET, though it looks like the problem started even before that. At the time of writing, it’s not clear how widespread the Microsoft 365 outage is or whether it’s affecting all Microsoft 365 services.

“We’re seeing a recurrence of the issue and a drop in service availability, so we’re applying mitigations to provide relief for the affected users, while we continue to investigate the root cause. We’ll be providing updates related to this event under MO572252 in the admin center,” Microsoft explained.

Microsoft 365 customers have expressed their concern with the company’s handling of the downtime. “Already we lost our production yesterday and today also it started. When will you resolve this issue permanently. Everyones business affected by your incapability,” a Microsoft 365 subscriber wrote on Twitter.

Microsoft 365 Services Hit With Another Outage Causing Connectivity Issues
Source: Downdetector

Major Microsoft 365 outages continue to plague organizations

It’s important to note that this is not the first time that users are experiencing issues while accessing Microsoft 365 apps and services. Microsoft suffered two global outages in January and February that prevented users from accessing emails and Microsoft Teams.

Back in April, Microsoft confirmed an issue that broke the search functionality across various Microsoft 365 services. These include Microsoft Teams, Outlook on the Web, Outlook desktop clients, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online.

Update 1 – (June 6, 2023) 7:00 AM ET: Microsoft 365 services are slowly coming back online. “We’re monitoring the environment while we investigate the underlying cause, increase monitoring, and develop further fixes to provide relief. Updates related to this event can be found under MO572252 in the admin center.”

Update 2 – (June 6, 2023) 12:04 PM ET: Microsoft has confirmed that the outage has begun impacting its Microsoft 365 services again. “We’ve identified that the impact has started again, and we’re applying further mitigation. Telemetry indicates a reduction in impact relative to earlier iterations due to previously applied mitigations. Further details about the workstreams are in the admin center via MO572252.”

Update 3 – (June 7, 2023) 12:30 AM ET: Microsoft engineers deployed a couple of “preemptive mitigations” to address the problem. However, some Twitter users reported that they are still unable to access select Microsoft 365 services. “We continue to observe stable service health since we’ve applied our various preemptive mitigations and we will closely monitor the service should there be a recurrence.”