Microsoft 365 was down for thousands of users; firm 'probing', reason for outage not known

Microsoft Corp's MSFT.O, a product suite which includes MS Word and Excel, was down for more than 15,000 users on Monday, June 5. As per an update shared by the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, the users complained about not being able to access Microsoft 365 due to unexplained issues. The software company has reported at least three outages this year. "We're investigating an issue with accessing Outlook on the web," Microsoft tweeted, without making immediately clear what caused the mass outage. 

In April, Microsoft fixed six-hour-long technical glitch

In April, Microsoft fixed a nearly six-hour-long technical glitch with the Microsoft 365 online applications and its Teams collaboration app as it remained inaccessible for up to several hours. The Redmond, Wash-based vendor tweeted that it was “investigating access issues with Microsoft 365 Online apps and the Teams admin centre.” The company had further said that it “received positive confirmation through our internal telemetry and impacted users that service has been restored.” Scores of users of the US technology giant had reported a problem, saying online that they were not able to access multiple Microsoft 365 services. “We’ve identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps,” the company, at the time, had said.

The Downdetector service that logs problems and outages with websites and apps, had stated that it saw a spike in users reporting issues with Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams and the company’s cloud product Azure. Microsoft acknowledged that its products were hit with a cloud outage that affected several of the users, globally. The company had noted that a network change was responsible for the disruption, adding that it rolled back on it. Customers who were impacted, after a few hours, said online that they their Microsoft 365 services were in recovery. Microsoft “rolled back a network change that we believe is causing an impact. We’re monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect," the firm noted in a tweet.