Microsoft fixes issue after temporary outage impacts thousands of users worldwide

Microsoft fixed an issue on Tuesday morning that had caused a temporary outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services worldwide.

According to the Microsoft 365 Service health status page, any service that leverages Azure Active Directory (AAD) may have been affected by the outage.

Users were unable to access multiple Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365 services.

Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outage, saw reports from users having trouble with services such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Office 365.

The tech giant had first addressed the issue at 1:10 am IST on March 16.

“We're investigating an issue for access to multiple M365 services. Please visit the admin centre post M0244568 for more information. We'll provide additional information here as it becomes available,” it said in a tweet from the official Microsoft 365 Status account.

“We've confirmed that this issue could be affecting users worldwide,” it had said.

Over 26,000 users had reported issues with Teams on Downdetector while more than 4,000 reports of issues with Office 365 were received. More than 2,300 users also reported problems with Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services.

Microsoft had then said that the issue was with a recent change it an authentication system and that it was rolling back the update to fix the outage.

“We've identified an issue with a recent change to an authentication system. We’re rolling back the update to mitigate impact, which we expect will take approximately 15 minutes,” it had said.

Service health improved across multiple Microsoft 365 services by 4:49 am IST.

At 10:05 am, Microsoft said, “We’ve confirmed impact has been largely mitigated and we’ll continue to provide service-specific updates via http://status.office.com and under MO244568 in the admin centre.”

According to the official status page, some services may still see residual impact of the outage.

For instance, Microsoft Teams users may notice message delivery delays. Users may also notice issues when searching for contacts, as per the page.

For Intune, users may notice impact to end-to-end service delivery. PowerBI users may be unable to refresh or load data flows, access settings, or leverage AAD. For Office Licensing, users may be unable to acquire, redeem, or retrieve a license for their Microsoft 365 applications.

“We're continuing to see multiple Microsoft 365 services return to healthy availability. We're addressing the delays in resolving the residual impact that is present for a subset of the impacted Microsoft 365 services,” Microsoft said.