Microsoft 365 suffers another outage, its sixth this year

Microsoft 365 suffered another outage on Monday, preventing users from accessing Microsoft 365 apps.

“We’re investigating an issue affecting access to https://msft.it/6016gbJ06 and Microsoft 365 apps,” the company said in a Tweet.

Users reported that they were experiencing issues when accessing their Outlook mailboxes and were unable to connect to the Microsoft 365 servers.

“We received reports that this impact manifested for users primarily in the North America, Poland, and United Kingdom regions, though users in other regions also may have been affected,” the company said in the alert.

Within an hour the company said the issue was resolved, “We’ve identified and corrected a problem that impacted content rendering on http://office.com and other sites,” the company Tweeted. 

Despite the quick response, the company received major backlash on Twitter mainly due to the frequent outages in Microsoft 365 services. 

The Microsoft service status page showed that Outlook, Skype, and Teams were facing issues at time of writing. For Outlook and Teams users, contact lists are being unexpectedly duplicated, while on Skype some users may be unable to make Skype outbound phone calls to Chinese numbers. 

“We’re continuing our efforts on a long-term solution to clean up the remaining duplicate contacts which will be available closer to the end of June,” the service status page states. 

Series of Microsoft outages this year 

The latest outage is the sixth service disruption faced by Microsoft this year. Each of the outages so far has involved at least some of the Microsoft 365 services. 

On May 9, the company said it was investigating an issue with accessing some Microsoft 365 services and features for users within the UK.

In April, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue where users may be unable to use the search functionality in multiple Microsoft 365 services. Outlook on the Web, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook desktop clients were among the affected services.

Earlier in the same month, users were unable to access Microsoft 365 web applications and Teams. Microsoft said it investigated the errors within the caching infrastructure and high CPU utilization on components that process backend navigation feature APIs. The services were subsequently restored.

Microsoft suffered a global outage in February due to which users were unable to access emails on Outlook or use the collaboration suite Teams. Users primarily located in the North American region were unable to access Outlook to send, receive, or search email. Additional functionality such as the calendar consumed by other services such as Microsoft Teams were also affected.

The company had to investigate a global outage affecting products and services including Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business along with Teams and Outlook in January as well. Two hours into the outage, Microsoft said it was rolling back a network change that it believed was causing the outage.