Microsoft Outlook users hit by Office 365 outage

Microsoft Office 365 has been hit with an outage, leaving Australian customers without connection to the online and mobile versions of Outlook.

Macquarie University revealed that staff emails were affected and at around 9.00am advised that Microsoft was investigating the issue.

According to its status page at the time, Macquarie University said that Microsoft identified "a configuration issue" and was working on fixing it. Just before 3.00pm, the university said the issue was rectified for most clients and was being monitored. The university's email services were back at 4.00pm.

Australia and Japan appear to have been hit the hardest with Aussie Outages picking up the disruption at approximately 11.00am on Wednesday, peaking at 345 complaints on the website. 

According to Microsoft, the problem was affecting users trying to connect to Outlook.com via the Mozilla Firefox browser. The company said it had completed restarting more than 97 percent of affected systems and anticipated that impact would be remediated by 1.00pm.

blueAPACHE's general manager of operations Simon Richardson told CRN that customers started to call and complain around 11.00am.

"Customers affected specifically were O365 only and not general Office users. blueAPACHE service centre commenced investigation and when it became clear that the incidents were not isolated to one customer we contacted Microsoft to determine if there was a known fault."

Microsoft then acknowledged a global outage regarding Microsoft Office 365.

"Users will continue to experience service restoration as the certificate data is refreshed across the environment."

A Microsoft spokesperson told CRN: "Some customers may have experienced difficulty connecting to some O365 services. Services are now restored."

Two months ago, Microsoft cloud customers suffered widespread outages, leaving OneDrive, Office 365, Skype, Outlook and Xbox Live inaccessible for hours.

Sorry for the inconvenience, Terry. We're investigating an issue with Exchange Online. We'll provide an update shortly.

— Office 365 (@Office365) May 30, 2017

We have had trouble sending and receiving emails today.
Microsoft Office 365 cloud service has an outage, affecting our Outlook connection.

— CAPIX Software (@CapixMedia) May 31, 2017

#OutlookDown ��Please fix it we need to study ! @Outlook @Microsoft @Office @TechCrunch @TheNextWeb @verge pic.twitter.com/2Bm0WK3CGu

— Mohamad Al Mansour (@MohamdALMansur) May 30, 2017