Microsoft Email And Office 365 Back After Global Outage

Microsoft Office 365 is up and running after an outage on Friday that left users without email throughout Europe and the Asia-Pacific. 

Account holders who tried to access email reportedly were informed: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.”

The UK appeared to be especially hard-hit. 

“Uk based -- no emails received or able to send for 14 hrs now Louis Clarke complained on Down Detector.

The service failure also apparently hit the United States.  

“Office365 users in my Org are reporting no external emails coming through and can't login to Skype,” BJP wrote on Down Detector. He added the location was

the “United States (multiple states).”

The result is that for several hours on Friday, email marketing messages are not able to be accessed via Office 365 in several countries.  

Microsoft acknowledged the service outage via Twitter, saying, “Hi. Today we’re investigating reports of our dear customers having issues with logging in to Microsoft Account/Office 365. Our Network Operation Center Engineers are currently working to resolve this. More details will be provided shortly.”

Later, it reported, "We've completed all recovery actions related to MO133518 and this issue is fully resolved as of Friday, April 6, 2018, at 11:30 AM UTC. Thanks to everyone who confirmed service restoration."

One user wrote on Down Detector, “Interestingly, if you tried to log in to Office365 via Microsoft authentication, things were kaput. But if you had SSO enabled you could log in without problems.

Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory, cloud-based service, also reportedly went for users worldwide, then was restored. 

The Office 365 outage, which The Argus claimed hit millions of users,  provided this wry comment from The Register: “The timing of this incident, following on from much trumpeting by Microsoft about the new security features introduced for Office 365 subscribers yesterday, is unfortunate.

“It would appear that Redmond has opted to secure user data by, er, removing access to it entirely. Clever.”

Microsoft announced last Thursday that it is offering new protection capabilities to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal users, including:

  • File recovery from malicious attacks like ransomware.
  • Tools to help keep information secure and private.
  • Advanced protection from viruses and cybercrime.

Included is what one commentator calls “end-to-end email encryption.”

 

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