Microsoft is investigating a widespread service issue causing authentication issues, connection problems, email delays and failures, and various other issues for Microsoft 365 customers.
It first acknowledged this incident (tracked under EX1464935 in the admin center) at 5:30 PM UTC, when it began investigating a stream of reports from users on social media regarding multiple issues affecting Exchange Online.
However, while Exchange Online is the most impacted service, Microsoft revealed in a new incident report (MO1465074) that this outage also impacts multiple other Microsoft 365 services, including OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Defender XDR.
According to outage tracking service Downdetector, tens of thousands of Outlook and Microsoft 365 users are affected and experiencing issues receiving emails via Outlook and accessing Microsoft cloud services.
Microsoft says the list of Exchange Online symptoms includes:
Although the company has yet to reveal which regions are impacted, it has classified this outage as an incident, which is typically used to describe critical service issues with noticeable user impact.
”We’ve isolated a common failure pattern across affected Exchange Online requests that is associated with authentication and protocol connectivity,” Microsoft added in the latest admin center update.
“We’re analyzing service telemetry to identify the underlying source of impact and validate potential remediation options. Additionally, we’re continuing to assess the scope of impact and monitor for additional affected scenarios.”
Microsoft has addressed multiple Exchange Online outages in recent months, most recently in June, when it mitigated a widespread service issue affecting the mail flow pipeline for customers across North America, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Europe.
In April, it also resolved Exchange Online mailbox access issues that had intermittently impacted Outlook mobile and macOS users for weeks, and an Exchange Online outage that prevented users from accessing their mailboxes via Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync, and other Exchange Online connection protocols.
Update August 31, 14:29 EDT: Microsoft blames the outage on core authentication configuration issues.
“We’ve identified issues related to a core authentication configuration used by multiple internal services within the Exchange Online infrastructure,” Microsoft said. “We’re performing a manual test on the individual server level to reset to configurations to validate if this resolves the issue.”
Update August 31, 15:09 EDT: Microsoft now tracks this outage under MO1465074 and says the incident also affects OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Defender XDR.
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Thanks Sergiu. I am just wondering why this issue is not classified as a prio 1… Nothing is working within EXO here…
I am going to keep saying it. Competency Crisis… And it’s not just Microsoft.
Was able to get into 365 apps this morning and everything was fine. Quickly discovered that restarting Outlook was a no-no, and staying in meant it all worked as expected; all day long. My last user just logged off, who knows what tomorrow will bring. Was able to get an early casualty authenticated by starting Outlook in safe mode, repeatedly, but now that is dead too. Can log into online account, Word works but Outlook times-out. Can log into admin account to read progress updates. I wonder if this has anything to do with them turning off SMS authentication as a MFA option. At 4:55 PM CDT, they posted: “We’re continuing our targeted review of affected infrastructure and recent changes made to the service to definitively confirm the cause of impact. We’re additionally continuing to test and implement various mitigation strategies to apply the necessary authentication component, which have so far yielded positive results. We’re monitoring these tests and mitigative actions closely and will provide an estimated time to resolution as soon as one is available.” The next update is in about 20 minutes.
Oh sure, just after I posted (can we not edit our own posts, or is Firefox messing me up?) Updated at 5:40 PM CDT: “We’re implementing a targeted mitigation to re-apply core authentication components across a sample of affected infrastructure and are closely monitoring corresponding service telemetry to validate the efficacy of this action. As a result of this work, some users are beginning to see recovery to some impacted scenarios. We’ll continue to incrementally expand this mitigation action more widely across the affected environments as quickly as possible.”
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