Less than two weeks after a global outage, Microsoft is facing another major setback, affecting its 365 services, including Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The company announced it is “currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features” in a statement shared on X on Tuesday.
Impact on Azure:
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
An alert on the Microsoft service status website indicated that the outage affected Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing platform that supports many services. This disruption hampered communication between apps, users, devices, and the internet.
User Reports and Response:
Same here in Belgium …
— Nyx (@TnyxNf) July 30, 2024
The outage was detected as user reports of issues with Outlook and other apps surged on DownDetector on Tuesday morning. Thousands of users reported problems with the email service. Microsoft 365 Status shared an update on social media, stating that the company “applied mitigations and rerouted user requests to provide relief.” Microsoft Support officials apologized online, saying, “We’re sorry to hear you’re running into issues with our services. Our experts are currently investigating the situation to resolve it as soon as possible.”
Expert Commentary:
Computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward criticized the failure of Microsoft’s network infrastructure, which was supposed to be “bomb-proof.” He remarked, “It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft. The culprit appears to be network infrastructure, but you would have hoped that with such important cloud-based systems there would not be a single point of failure.”
