Hundreds of people have taken to social media to complain after Microsoft services including Outlook suffered an outage.
The first issues were reported at just before 7am this morning, with Microsoft saying at around 9am that they have isolated the problem to a ‘networking configuration issue’ and are trying to resolve it without causing ‘additional impact’ to users.
The problem left millions of people working from the office or their homes were left without access to emails, causing chaos for many – although the issue appeared to have been partially resolved before 9am.
Microsoft said on its status page and on Twitter at around 9am: ‘We’ve isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue, and we are analyzing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing additional impact.
‘We’ll provide more information once we have additional information.’
It had initially said just after 7.30am that it was ‘investigating’ the outage issues.
Microsoft 365 is the firm’s name for its collection of programs and services, which also include Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel as well as communication platform Teams.
The firm said on its ‘health status’ page that it has received reports that its OneDrive cloud storage facility, SharePoint Online service and Microsoft Graph are also having problems.
According to downdetector.co.uk, a website that tracks outages on tech and mobile platforms, more than 4,885 users reported problems.
The first outage report for Outlook was filed just before 07:00 GMT this morning, and they quickly skyrocketed to in the thousands.
Another user said on Twitter that the connection in their Teams meeting is so bad it was as if ‘everyone’s using dial-up’.
Others are overjoyed at the surprise ‘day off’ they were given, as the lack of access to the applications left them unable to do their jobs.
One Twitter user said: ‘So what are we doing on our day off now that Outlook and Teams aren’t working?’
Microsoft 365 announced on Twitter that it has ‘identified a potential networking issue’ and is ‘reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps.’
It added that problems may persist with other applications, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Graph.
Reports of issues with the Microsoft suite of tools initially came in from India, but now appear to be affecting users worldwide.
An update is expected from the tech giant shortly.
