• by Ray Schultz , September 6, 2018

Microsoft says it has mostly restored services after an outage that left users without access to Azure and Office 365 in the central Southern states on Tuesday, and says that the failure was caused by bad weather.

A post for Azure customers says that engineers have “restored available for the majority of impacted services, and should be continuing to see improvements in service availability.

“A severe weather event, including lightning strikes, occurred near one of the South Central US datacenters. This resulted in a power voltage increase that impacted cooling systems. Automated datacenter procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity entered a structured power down process.” 

On Tuesday, it said that customers “may experience difficulties may experience difficulties connecting to resources hosted in this region.”

However, users were still complaining on Down Detector late Wednesday and early Thursday morning.

Issues still persist in North America, Europe, and APAC,” writes one. 

Microsoft should spend more time shoring up their infrastructure instead of rolling out one competing feature after another,” writes another. “We have so many errors with Excel 2016 it's hard to tell what's service related and what's bugs. FIX IT FIRST.”

The company adds that engineers are “continuing to work on any residual storage impact to fully mitigate this issue.”

On Tuesday, Down Detector reported that Outlook accounted for 23% of the reported problems. It ranked behind servicer connection (48%) and Login (28%

On Thursday, with service apparently restored or many, Outlook comprised 42% of the reports coming into Down Detector, followed by server connection (33%) and login (24%).