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Microsoft has said it is investigating an issue where some users may be unable to access some Microsoft 365 services, after thousands of outage reports related to the workplace productivity software.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, there were nearly 23,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365. An additional 4,300 reported problems with Teams. The issues also appear to be affecting Microsoft’s other online services, among them Xbox Live, Outlook and the Microsoft Store.
Around 1,500 users of Microsoft’s cloud service Azure also reported outages, and the team said on X it was investigating “reports of a potential issue connecting to Microsoft services from AT&T networks.”
⚠️We are investigating customer reports of a potential issue connecting to Microsoft services from AT&T networks. More details will be provided as they become available.
— Azure Support (@AzureSupport) September 12, 2024
The tech giant wrote on its affiliated Microsoft 365 Status account on X: “We’re investigating an issue where users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services. Please look for MO888473 in the admin center for more details and further updates.” The company didn’t mention the number of affected users or the cause of the problem.
We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services. Please look for MO888473 in the admin center for more details and further updates.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 12, 2024
At the time of writing, the company’s status page says “Everything is up and running.”
Microsoft faces major outages
The disruption comes almost two months after a flawed update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, impacted 8.5 million Windows devices, severely disrupting activities across various sectors including airlines, banks, and healthcare.
On Tuesday (September 10), the company held a summit to discuss steps to improve cybersecurity systems. It marked the first significant step by Microsoft to address the issues as it raised concerns that many organizations were not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT system, or a piece of software within it, goes down.
Microsoft Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security David Weston at the Windows Endpoint Security Summit: “The Windows security ecosystem must come together to innovate a safer and more reliable world." pic.twitter.com/HQMJGSsZPZ
— Microsoft News and Stories (@MSFTnews) September 10, 2024
Microsoft executive David Weston told the summit that the “Windows security ecosystem must come together to innovate a safer and more reliable world.”
Update: A Microsoft spokesperson told ReadWrite at 11:15 ET/ 16:15 BST on Thursday: “A third-party Internet Service Provider incident that impacted a subset of their customers’ ability to access our services is now fully resolved.”
Featured image: Ideogram
