Microsoft 365 suffers major outage, multiple services like Outlook, Teams stops working for users

Microsoft rolls back change that caused the outage and stopped Microsoft 365 services from working, said they are looking into exactly what caused it. Some users are still affected by the outage.

Microsoft did not mention how many users were affected by this outage but mentioned that they were working on a fix and investigating the issue.  (REUTERS)

Roughly about four hours ago, Microsoft announced on Twitter that a recent change it had introduced lead to a major outage that affected users' access to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook.com and Microsoft Teams.

The Microsoft 365 Status posted on Twitter that they have “published MO222965 to the Microsoft 365 Admin Dashboard, and will also be updating http://status.office.com with updates to our investigation”.

And followed it up with - 

We've rolled back the change that is likely the source of impact and are monitoring the environment to validate that service is recovering. Please visit https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl for additional information on this issue.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 28, 2020

While Microsoft rolled back the change, they said that they were “not observing an increase in successful connections after rolling back a recent change” and that they were “working to evaluate additional mitigation solutions while we investigate the root cause”.

A moment ago nothing was working, then I went into files in teams and it was working, now nothing is working. Well I guess now I have an excuse to not do work and watch TV. Thank you Microsoft !!!

— Blaze| #WeWantThe100Prequel | #SoylunaParaSiempre (@Midnightblaze05) September 28, 2020

As a solution, Microsoft said that they were pursuing mitigation steps for the issue and rerouting traffic to alternate systems in the meanwhile to provide relief to the users affected. 

Microsoft did not mention how many users were affected by this outage. 

Several Twitter users complained that the outage meant they could miss their job interviews and deadline for college assignments.

The Xbox maker also said they were working to evaluate other solutions while they investigate the root cause of the outage.

We're continuing to see significant improvement for affected services and most users should be experiencing relief. Additional details can be found at https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 29, 2020

The issue seems to have been resolved for now as some users tweeted that things were working fine for them. 

Our services appear to be fully restored. I believe our services started seeing improvements a little after 7 pm CST. Took about another 30 - 45 minutes to get through the rest of our services and be fully restored. All good now... Thank you!

— John Haverty (@havertyj) September 29, 2020

The outage lead to many users being unable to access any services that leveraged Azure Active Directory (AAD) including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Teams Live Events as well as Office.com. Power Platform and Dynamics365 properties were also affected by this incident.

Microsoft mentioned on status.office.com that existing customer sessions have not been impacted and any user who is logged in to an existing session will be able to continue their sessions.

However, the company added that while the majority of services have recovered for most customers, a small subset of users “whose tenants are located in the North American region” are still impacted. 

Microsoft is currently working on mitigation steps for these customers. 

The majority of services are now recovered for most users. We're closely monitoring some residual impact for a subset customers located within North America. Please visit https://t.co/lbjX5iaxCX for additional information.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 29, 2020

We shall update our story with more information as soon as we receive it. 

(With agency inputs)