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Multiple Microsoft 365 services are facing another outage

The Microsoft 365 logo surrounded by Office apps logos

Users around the world have been reporting issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and features for the past few hours. Microsoft has confirmed that certain users are experiencing access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features, and they are investigating the situation.

We're currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features. More information can be found under MO842351 in the admin center.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 30, 2024

Impacted services include, but are not limited to:

  • Microsoft Entra
  • Microsoft Power Platform
  • Microsoft Intune
  • Microsoft 365 Admin Center

The following services are not impacted:

  • SharePoint Online
  • OneDrive for Business
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Exchange Online

To mitigate the network issue, Microsoft has implemented networking configuration changes and performed failovers to alternate networking paths. According to Microsoft's telemetry, these networking changes have shown improvement in service availability since approximately 14:10 UTC. Microsoft is continuing to monitor the situation to ensure the full recovery of all Microsoft 365 services.

Given that Microsoft 365 services experienced a similar outage earlier this month, it's clear that Microsoft needs to prioritize enhancing the reliability of its cloud infrastructure. Repeated disruptions to essential services not only inconvenience users but also raise concerns about the platform's stability. As we await further updates from Microsoft, we hope they will take significant steps to prevent such issues from recurring in the future.

Update:

Microsoft has now resolved the issue and published the following details on its Azure Status page.

What happened?

Between approximately at 11:45 UTC and 19:43 UTC on 30 July 2024, a subset of customers may have experienced issues connecting to a subset of Microsoft services globally. Impacted services included Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, as well as the Azure portal itself and a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services.

What do we know so far?

An unexpected usage spike resulted in Azure Front Door (AFD) and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) components performing below acceptable thresholds, leading to intermittent errors, timeout, and latency spikes. While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which activated our DDoS protection mechanisms, initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.

How did we respond?

Customer impact began at 11:45 UTC and we started investigating. Once the nature of the usage spike was understood, we implemented networking configuration changes to support our DDoS protection efforts, and performed failovers to alternate networking paths to provide relief. Our initial network configuration changes successfully mitigated majority of the impact by 14:10 UTC. Some customers reported less than 100% availability, which we began mitigating at around 18:00 UTC. We proceeded with an updated mitigation approach, first rolling this out across regions in Asia Pacific and Europe. After validating that this revised approach successfully eliminated the side effect impacts of the initial mitigation, we rolled it out to regions in the Americas. Failure rates returned to pre-incident levels by 19:43 UTC - after monitoring traffic and services to ensure that the issue was fully mitigated, we declared the incident mitigated at 20:48 UTC. Some downstream services took longer to recover, depending on how they were configured to use AFD and/or CDN.

Source: Microsoft

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