Customers worldwide were unable to connect with Microsoft’s 365 services and its cloud platform Azure on Tuesday, a problem the company says it is investigating and which has now been partly resolved.
According to Downdetector, an online outage tracker, the number of reports related to Microsoft services surged to more than 200 just before 9 a.m. ET. They had dipped back down by early afternoon. Customers reported issues with Microsoft logins, the company’s Outlook platform and its website.
The company said an unexpected “usage spike” of its Azure cloud service had led to intermittent errors and timeout messages.
Microsoft says it had monitored some improvements to service access but that it was still investigating services and regions where the problems persist.
On a page dedicated to service updates, the company wrote that users who are able to access Microsoft 365 platforms “may experience latency or degraded feature performance.”
The company’s initial investigation found that collaborative software such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online aren’t affected. Problems with its Microsoft 365 administration centre and its coding tool collection Power Platform were resolved.
The issue began at 11:45 a.m. UTC/7:45 a.m. ET, according to the company. Its website shows that the problems are affecting its networks around the world, including in Canada.
Azure, which is Microsoft’s brand for cloud services, is a “giant in the industry,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst based in London, Ont.
It’s the technology that underpins most of Microsoft’s services, including Office 365, Teams, Bing and Xbox, he said.
“The sad fact of technology in 2024 is any company on any day can have an outage. Microsoft is no exception,” Levy said, although he stressed that the outage wasn’t a repeat of the recent CrowdStrike outage.
He said that while the outage isn’t a cyberattack, cybercriminals still take advantage of major outages like this by emailing, texting and direct messaging potential customers through social media.
The messages might urge users to click a link to restore any services that were impacted by the outage. “And of course, do not click that link because that will get you into trouble,” Levy said.
CBC News reached out to Microsoft for more information. A spokesperson for the company wrote in response that “we are investigating reports of issues connecting to our services. More details will be provided as they become available on the Azure status page.”
The company is announcing its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. ET.