Microsoft suffered a relatively brief but certainly inconvenient outage on Thursday. A number of its popular productivity services went down — most notably its Microsoft 365 software, which includes Word and Excel — causing issues for US employees in the middle of a workday. In addition, users reported problems accessing popular productivity apps like Teams and Outlook.
User-reported issues for Microsoft 365 surfaced on Down Detector around 2 pm ET, peaking at 2:30 pm ET. (Disclosure: Down Detector is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns Mashable.) As of about 5 pm ET, user-reported issues with 365 had fallen off precipitously.
Is the Microsoft outage over?
In short: Yes, it seems so. Microsoft itself confirmed the problem appeared to be resolved, though it did so in corporate speak.
“We identified that a portion of network infrastructure in North America was misconfigured, resulting in impact,” read a statement from its 365 status account on monitoring that rebalancing the affected traffic successfully resolved the issue and service health has recovered.”
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An inability to access 365 means big problems for workers, considering it means losing Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive. It’s hard to work without such key services. Reuters also noted that there were earlier reported issues with Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online, two other key work services.
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Here’s what you need to know about the outage.
What happened to Microsoft 365? The answer lies with Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft’s issues on Thursday stemmed from a problem with Azure, the company’s cloud platform. The company said there was a problem with its Azure Front Door (AFD) service, which is its content delivery network. That meant customers couldn’t access some of their services.
Microsoft said that “a platform issue resulted in impact to the Azure Front Door (AFD) service. Impacted customers experienced intermittent delays or timeouts when accessing their services.” Microsoft noted the issue began in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
All told, the outage was relatively short-lived. Thankfully, it’s nothing like the massive 2024 Microsoft outage that was caused by CrowdStrike. It was a chaotic afternoon for some 365 users, but it all seems to be resolved hours later.
