There’s been another breakdown in Microsoft’s crucial online services – the third in only ten days.
The trouble started on Thursday 7th October about 2:45pm US East Coast time (18:45 UTC). Users could not login to Microsoft cloud services.
According to Microsoft, the outage affected “Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook.com.” In other words, pretty much everything day to day paying customers use.
Microsoft 365 offline! What happened and what you should do
‘Outlook’ has another breakdown – the second this week
“Accessibility” Issues
People could not login to the cloud services, Microsoft euphemism for that is “accessibility issues”.
Redmond didn’t say a lot about the outage. It’s not clear if all customers were affected or only those trying to login.
WTF happened?
It seems to be a similar problem to the last two troubles. Microsoft applied a patch to their cloud systems and the patch was broken … again.
They had to roll-back to a last known working state and that takes time.
In this case it took about four hours for normal service to be restored.
This has got to stop
Maintaining a complex network is difficult but “come on Microsoft”, this has got to stop. Clearly there’s a problem with software updates not being properly tested before public release.
There’s a little comfort seeing Microsoft caught with a faulty patch, the same problem they’ve inflicted on customers too many times in the past. Office and Windows users have suffered with buggy patches for years. It’s taken Microsoft a lot longer than four hours to admit their mistake, let alone fix it.
What you can do
Always have a backup plan. We don’t mean copies of your files and data, though that’s important too.
Setup alternative non-Microsoft cloud storage and emailing services. If and when your core cloud services go down, you have some way to keep working and communicate.
Microsoft 365 offline! What happened and what you should do
‘Outlook’ has another breakdown – the second this week
Three-day Aussie breakdown of Outlook.com
