A Monday morning glitch by Microsoft has accidently disabled access to most Microsoft 365 Stock images and more.
At 5:30pm UTC (12:30pm NYC): Microsoft 365 Stock Content is now available on our test machines in the UK and USA. Give your Insert | Pictures | Stock Images a try with fingers crossed!
The expired digital certificate has been updated and is now valid to 15 Feb 2023.
Microsoft has yet to acknowledge there’s even a problem <sigh>.
Keep an eye on this page … we’ll update as more info (hopefully from Microsoft) arrives.
First reported by Markus Lintuala, it seems the digital certificate used by Microsoft’s Stock images server has expired.
As Marcus says, it happens sometimes. But it’s hard to understand how Microsoft’s internal systems can’t track the expiry of their many digital certificates.
What it means
As at 10am UTC on Monday 15th August 2022 … about half the Stock content isn’t available in Microsoft 365. No thumbnails appearing and trying to Insert only gets an error, not content.
It’s definitely an expired certificate, we saw the same error as Marcus.
Icons, Cartoon People and Illustrations might appear to be still available but are NOT. Thumbnails show up but there’s an error if you try to Insert the full item “An error occurred while importing this file.”
Cutout People, Stickers and Videos are also offline.
It might be a little different on your computer, depending on which thumbnail images have been cached to your machine before the certificate expired.
Microsoft has been notified though their initial response wasn’t good. On Twitter @MSFT365Status just gave the rote ‘please open a ticket’ response instead of taking a moment to check for themselves. Not a good look.
Even when Microsoft fixes the problem, it might take an hour or more for any updated certificate to spread across the Internet.
Microsoft’s response …
Microsoft’s public response so far has been typically poor. They seem to be trying to minimise the problem by suggesting that only Sharepoint is affected (wrong), only Stock Images are unavailable (also wrong) and consumer Office users aren’t affected (thrice wrong).
If you have a Microsoft 365 Business/Enterprise/Education admin access then check out the Message Center SP414078
Does Microsoft really not understand the extent of the problem (hard to believe)? Or is the company doing it’s usual trick of trying to downplay their mistake in the hope that customers won’t notice?
Though you have to admire their obfuscation with stock phrases. Instead of saying, “the digital certificate for the service had expired” customer get this techno-babble ….
“…we’ve determined that a specific configuration issue within an upstream service responsible for regulating stock image availability is causing impact.”
From SP414078
Microsoft goes further in their attempt to downplay the problem. Not only is the bug wrongly marked as ‘Sharepoint Online’ only (Microsoft 365 customers generally are affected). The bug report is given the lowest rating ‘Advisory: A minor service issue with limited impact‘ – which is silly (to out it politely).
According to @MSFT365Status there’s also SP414201 service health report but that report isn’t available to Admins.
More info …
As reported by @BitCoinDurp the problem is with the certificate linked to cdn.hubblecontent.osi.office.net
Microsoft’s own Edge browser has a good explanation of the difficulty.
