Microsoft services including Office 365, Skype hit with global outage, now restored

Microsoft on Wednesday was severely hit with a global outage. According to outage.report, several Microsoft services including Office 365, Xbox App, Xbox Live, Skype, Microsoft Azure suffered a worldwide outage while Office 365 remained the most-affected service.

On Twitter, many users complained about being unable to access the service. At 6:50 AM IST, the Office 365 team acknowledged the problem and said they were investigating an issue preventing access to Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft said a networking build caused user traffic from the internet to Microsoft 365 services to intermittently fail, resulting in a service outage. Microsoft said it identified and reverted affected networking build and was seeing signs of recovery.

What caused the problem

At 10:34 AM, Microsoft said it restored access and functionality for all Microsoft 365 services.

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"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," Office 365 said in its latest statement.

As per Outage.report, majority of complaints originated from the US, Japan, Netherlands, UK and Australia. Majority of Office 365 users experienced a total blackout while some users faced issues with signing in to the service.

In related news, Microsoft said that its own workplace collaboration service Teams now has more than 20 million daily active users, which is 8 million more than what Slack boasted of having last month.

Microsoft benefits from being able to bundle Teams as part of a software package that includes email and other products. Slack’s shares took a hit after Microsoft’s announcement Tuesday.

(With AP inputs)