Microsoft 365 outage hits Azure, Outlook, and Teams

microsoft 365 apps displayed on a monitor

Microsoft 365 is back online after suffering a major global service outage on Monday.

The outage, which lasted for more than five hours, affected Microsoft services including Azure, Outlook.com, Office.com, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams.

The downtime affected "millions" of users of Microsoft's cloud-based services, according to reports, but Microsoft said people who were logged into an existing 365 session were still able to keep using the service.

“Affected users are encouraged to keep existing sessions going and to avoid re-authenticating to Microsoft 365 services," the company said. "Any Microsoft 365 service that leverages Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication may be impacted by this issue."

Microsoft initially said the problem was linked to a recent update and restored the software to an earlier version. However, that fix failed to restore services.

“Rolling back the previously described change did not resolve the incident as expected,” Microsoft said on its Office.com status page. “We’re evaluating additional options to remediate the problem.”

About two hours later the company said it was seeing improvements after putting in place alternative mitigation steps.

"After extended monitoring of our service, we have confirmed that the issue has been fully mitigated and is running within optimal service levels," it said.

The Microsoft 365 outage, which comes just months after Microsoft Teams went down across Europe, is particularly problematic given how many users are currently reliant on its services to perform work remotely. In April, Microsoft reported 75 million daily active users of Teams as a result of more people working from home.

Several Twitter users also complained that the outage meant they could miss their job interviews and deadlines for school assignments.

Microsoft said it will be reviewing its code to understand what prevented users from being able to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.

Carly Page

Carly Page is a freelance technology journalist, editor and copywriter specialising in cyber security, B2B, and consumer technology. She has more than a decade of experience in the industry and has written for a range of publications including Forbes, IT Pro, the Metro, TechRadar, TechCrunch, TES, and WIRED, as well as offering copywriting and consultancy services. 

Prior to entering the weird and wonderful world of freelance journalism, Carly served as editor of tech tabloid The INQUIRER from 2012 and 2019. She is also a graduate of the University of Lincoln, where she earned a degree in journalism.

You can check out Carly's ramblings (and her dog) on Twitter, or email her at hello@carlypagewrites.co.uk.