Microsoft 365 outage strikes, lasts about four hours

On the day that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella visits Australia, the company's Microsoft 365 service is experiencing an Office 365 outage.

Microsoft took to Twitter to reveal the outage just a few minutes ago.

We're investigating an issue preventing access to Microsoft 365 services. We'll provide additional details shortly on https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 20, 2019

CRN understands that the problem affects the Office Admin portal, Teams and Sharepoint, plus possible also Visual Studio and DevOps.

The outage comes a day after the service wobbled for Australian users.

On November 19th Microsoft’s status report Twitter account reported “an issue affecting mail flow in the APAC and Australian regions” and later confirmed “that mail from external senders, and mail with attachments from internal senders is affected.”

The issue later spread to India and Japan.

At around 8PM on 19 November Microsoft wrote that it had “identified that an update, intended to improve anti-spam processes, may have caused unexpected impact to mail flow.”

At around midnight it declared the situation “resolved”.

It is unclear if the new outage is related to yesterday’s events, or if a different problem has occurred.

CRN will update this story as new information comes to hand.

UPDATE: 1:45PM AEST.

At the time of writing, the Microsoft 365 Service health status page advised " We've determined that users may experience intermittent access issues with the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, and Yammer at this time. We're continuing our investigation into the root cause and we'll provide more information when we’ve isolated the root cause."

UPDATE 4:15 PM AEST

Microsoft now says the outage is over.

We've confirmed restored access and functionality for all Microsoft 365 services. Please see MO196220 in the admin dashboard for final details of the event.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 20, 2019

Plenty of online chatter laments the incidents. Among those CRN has spotted was one user declaring that Teams made them very productive today - as they didn't receive any disruptive notifications for hours.

Another suggested Office 365 might be better-named Office 361-and-a-half.