Microsoft says it is investigating a problem that’s conserving prospects worldwide from connecting to its Microsoft 365 companies and its cloud platform Azure.
Based on Downdetector, a web-based outage tracker, the variety of studies associated to Microsoft companies surged to greater than 200 simply earlier than 9 a.m. ET. That they had dipped again down by early afternoon. Clients reported points with Microsoft logins, the corporate’s Outlook platform and its web site.
The corporate mentioned an sudden “utilization spike” of its Azure cloud service had led to intermittent errors and timeout messages.
Microsoft mentioned it had monitored some enhancements to service entry however that it was nonetheless investigating companies and areas the place the issues persist.
On a web page devoted to service updates, the corporate wrote that customers who’re in a position to entry Microsoft 365 platforms “might expertise latency or degraded characteristic efficiency.”
It mentioned impacted companies embrace its Microsoft 365 admin centre, cloud companies Intune and Entra, and its coding instrument assortment Energy Platform. Its preliminary investigation discovered that collaborative software program equivalent to Microsoft Groups, SharePoint On-line, OneDrive for Enterprise and Alternate On-line aren’t affected.
The problem started at 11:45 a.m. UTC/7:45 a.m. ET, in keeping with the corporate. Its web site exhibits that the problems are affecting its networks around the globe, together with in Canada.
Azure, which is Microsoft’s model for cloud companies, is a “big within the business,” mentioned Carmi Levy, a know-how analyst primarily based in London, Ont.
It is the know-how that underpins most of Microsoft’s personal companies, together with Workplace 365, Groups, Bing and Xbox, he added.
“The unhappy truth of know-how in 2024 is any firm on any day can have an outage. Microsoft isn’t any exception,” Levy mentioned, though he harassed that the outage wasn’t a repeat of the current CrowdStrike outage.
He mentioned that whereas the outage is not a cyberattack, cybercriminals nonetheless benefit from main outages just like the one which Microsoft is reporting by emailing, texting and direct messaging potential prospects by means of social media.
The messages may urge customers to click on a hyperlink to revive any companies that have been impacted by the outage. “And naturally, don’t click on that hyperlink as a result of that may get you into bother,” Levy mentioned.
CBC Information reached out to Microsoft for extra info. A spokesperson for the corporate wrote in response that “we’re investigating studies of points connecting to our companies. Extra particulars might be supplied as they develop into out there on the Azure standing web page.”
The corporate is saying its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. ET.
