Microsoft 365 Endured 9+ Hours of Outages Thursday (crn.com) 36
Early Friday "there were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET," reports Reuters. But that's down "from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector." Reuters points out the outage affected antivirus software Microsoft Defender and data governance software Microsoft Purview, while CRN notes it also impacted "a number of Microsoft 365 services" including Outlook and Exchange online:
During the outage, Outlook users received a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email. Users did not have the ability to send and receive email through Exchange Online, including notification emails from Microsoft Viva Engage, according to the vendor. Other issues that cropped up include an inability to send and receive subscription email through [analytics platform] Microsoft Fabric, collect message traces, search within SharePoint online and Microsoft OneDrive and create chats, meetings, teams, channels or add members in Microsoft Teams...
As with past cloud outages with other vendors, even after Microsoft fixed the issues, recovery efforts by its users to return to a normal state took additional time... Microsoft confirmed in a post on X [Thursday] at 4:14 p.m. ET that it "restored the affected infrastructure to a (healthy) state" but "further load balancing is required to mitigate impact...." The company reported "residual imbalances across the environment" at 7:02 p.m., "restored access to the affected services" and stable mail flow at 12:33 a.m. Jan. 23. At that time, Microsoft still saw a "small number of remaining affected services" without full service stability. The company declared impact from the event "resolved" at 1:29 p.m. Eastern. Microsoft sent out another X post at 8:20 a.m. asking users experiencing residual issues to try "clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation...."
Microsoft said in an admin center update that [Thursday's] outage was "caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure." Furthermore, Microsoft noted that during "ongoing efforts to rebalance traffic" it introduced a "targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process, which incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure." US itek's David Stinner said it appears that Microsoft did not have enough capacity on its backup system while doing maintenance on its main system. "It looks like the backup system was overloaded, and it brought the system down while they were still doing maintenance on the main system," he said. "That is why it took so many hours to get back up and running. If your primary system is down for maintenance and your backup system fails due to capacity issues, then it is going to take a while to get your primary system back up and running."
"This was not Microsoft's first outage of 2026," the article notes, "with the vendor handling access issues with Teams, Outlook and other M365 services on Wednesday, a Copilot issue on Jan. 15 plus an Azure outage earlier in the month..."
As with past cloud outages with other vendors, even after Microsoft fixed the issues, recovery efforts by its users to return to a normal state took additional time... Microsoft confirmed in a post on X [Thursday] at 4:14 p.m. ET that it "restored the affected infrastructure to a (healthy) state" but "further load balancing is required to mitigate impact...." The company reported "residual imbalances across the environment" at 7:02 p.m., "restored access to the affected services" and stable mail flow at 12:33 a.m. Jan. 23. At that time, Microsoft still saw a "small number of remaining affected services" without full service stability. The company declared impact from the event "resolved" at 1:29 p.m. Eastern. Microsoft sent out another X post at 8:20 a.m. asking users experiencing residual issues to try "clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation...."
Microsoft said in an admin center update that [Thursday's] outage was "caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure." Furthermore, Microsoft noted that during "ongoing efforts to rebalance traffic" it introduced a "targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process, which incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure." US itek's David Stinner said it appears that Microsoft did not have enough capacity on its backup system while doing maintenance on its main system. "It looks like the backup system was overloaded, and it brought the system down while they were still doing maintenance on the main system," he said. "That is why it took so many hours to get back up and running. If your primary system is down for maintenance and your backup system fails due to capacity issues, then it is going to take a while to get your primary system back up and running."
"This was not Microsoft's first outage of 2026," the article notes, "with the vendor handling access issues with Teams, Outlook and other M365 services on Wednesday, a Copilot issue on Jan. 15 plus an Azure outage earlier in the month..."
Nearly 113 huh... (Score:2, Insightful)
What an unusual number to approximate to.
Re: (Score:2)
If we were down to Microsoft 355 already and 113 complained, it would at least be a useful ratio ...
Re: (Score:2)
Stop exaggerating! By its own definition, office 365 is down one day every four years. Otherwise, it would be called office 365.25
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I shaved my neck yesterday, for my in-office day.
The sales premise of cloud services from the world's largest providers is that they are dead-nuts reliable because of their fundamentally superior architectural advantages.
Many 365 users probably did not know or care ... (Score:1)
Re:Many 365 users probably did not know or care .. (Score:5, Interesting)
I knew! It was pretty obvious, tbh.
When Outlook stopped working, I just said "computers eh?".
Then I closed it down, and went downstairs to buy a coffee and have a long lunch.
I think my productivity went up.
Re: (Score:1)
I bought Office 2016 almost a decade ago and have been migrating it to each new computer as I upgrade. I have not seen any new features that I feel necessitated buying a newer version. Compared to the yearly Office365 cost I guess I have saved almost $800 in not needing a subscription. The cloud storage might be useful to some, but I've never needed nor missed it. I have a robust storage and backup strategy that I don't have to worry about anything of mine being used to train someone's AI model.
Perhaps
Re: (Score:1)
All footage from the incident shows the victim, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, with his phone in his hand the entire time, never once is he seen with the handgun - he was legally carrying - in his hand. The only person seen with Pretti’s gun is an agent who removed it from his waistband before the first shots were fired. Everything suggests he was unarmed when shot by agents with Border Patrol and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They're coming for your guns !
They literally took away his gun.
And then executed him.
Lucky the Republicans are against that kind of thing and will be rallying around all the amendments and things and taking up arms and doing stuff. Don't tread on me!
Oh sorry, you're a bit busy licking the boots of the oppressors. never mind then.
Re: (Score:2)
You can use Office without any Microsoft services. But a lot of offices use them for email because managing email is so hard now. If you do this then unfortunately there is sufficient integration between Outlook and 365 that it's hard to even launch Outlook. All your other programs will work, but what if you also depend on web services with email 2FA in order to get work done? In that case you were probably SOL, as fewer than 1% of those messages reached recipients before the next day. They all did eventual
Office 364 (Score:5, Funny)
Countdown 2026 begins!
If this keeps up (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't just Copilot. It was also Outlook. Also, some orgs' Teams went down.
For me it was just Outlook, Teams stayed up. But since Outlook was down, I mostly couldn't 2FA to things I need to work.
After a few attempts, I actually did complete the 2FA challenge once. But of hundreds of attempts in my org, only a few succeeded. Then we got the emails the next day.
It's nice that Microsoft didn't lose mail, but delivering it timely is also part of what people are expecting, for obvious reasons.
Re: (Score:3)
Almost ... (Score:2)
"there were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET," reports Reuters. But that's down "from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector."
Only a few more customers to drive away. Then you can put this on the shelf next to the Zune.
New ICE terminology takes hold. (Score:4, Insightful)
It was a "targeted load balancing" change. Just like ICE's targeted operations, the new usage means "We fucked up but we're never going to admit it.
Re: (Score:2)
Is the missing word 'mistakenly' or 'incorrectly' or 'unfortunate' before 'targeted'?
Re: (Score:3)
Research indicates a generally positive, though not linear, correlation between empathy and intelligence, particularly with emotional intelligence (EQ) and cognitive, rather than just affective, empathy. While high IQ can aid in recognizing and interpreting emotional cues, it does not guarantee high empathy; rather, it often enables a form of "cognitive empathy" where individuals process emotions intellectually.
So maybe you meant "dumber."
Hyperdysfunction (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hyperdysfunction (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately not. My insurance refused to cover the lobotomy.
Nice reliably system they have there (Score:3)
I guess they were so keen to get everybody locked in because they knew they could not deliver. Expect things to get worse, far worse.
Re: Nice reliably system they have there (Score:3)
Microsoft has the goal of becoming too essential to fail so they can charge anything they like.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft has the goal of becoming too essential to fail so they can charge anything they like.
They're well on their way. Give it another couple years and the government will have to pay them a few billion dollars every time they have an outtage. That's the big business dream. Too big to fail = government handouts for failure.
Yet another screwup (Score:2)
This is yet another reason why I'm glad I don't have any M$ products. Now if I could just get my employer to agree...
TTL? (Score:2)
Clearing caches, ok... But... And maybe its because I'm just a BIND 9.x guy... How do I lower the TTL for a Microslop hosted record? Even for records I host, changing the TTL doesn't force the remote caches to expire early.
T
More of the same (Score:3)
"The Enshittification will continue until morale improves!"
"fortunately not" (Score:2)
Trusting ANY cloud for vital operations = dumb (Score:2)
Install locally, save locally.
Trusting the cloud opens you to all sorts of miserable prospects. Sure, clouds are fine for archiving. But using them as a primary storage container or relying on them for the most basic applications that drive your business?
LOLS, what idiots.