Thursday, September 19, 2024

Microsoft hit with another global outage – with users unable to access emails, Xbox Live and 365 functions

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Microsoft 365 has announced it is investigating poor performance issues with its services and features.

The complaints mark yet another global outage with users struggling to access emails, Xbox and other 365 functions.

The company reported its systems were down at about 9:15 a.m. EST which has reportedly impacted networks across Europe and the US.

This outage comes less than two weeks after Microsoft servers experienced a global outage that grounded thousands of flights and disrupted banks and emergency services.

Microsoft 365 is experiencing outages on its email servers and Xbox and Minecraft services

‘We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally. Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services,’ Microsoft said in a post on X.

‘We have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue. More details will be provided as soon as possible.’

The company added that ‘more information can be found under MO842351 in the admin center.’

Microsoft said on the admin center that its Azure services went down and ‘a subset of customers may experience issues connecting to … services globally.’

Azure is a cloud firewall security serves that provides threat protections for files, data and other apps.

DownDetector has received hundreds of reports from users since 8 a.m. EST who have complained that they can’t access their email on the app or in a browser and people aren’t receiving scheduled calendar invitations. 

The admin center said it will issue another update at 11 a.m. EST and they currently ‘have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue as soon as possible.

‘We’ve identified multiple workstreams and are working to mitigate impacted workstreams by performing failover operations.’

People have taken to X to complain about the outage with one person writing that both their Xbox and Minecraft is down.

‘Who at Microsoft’s bright idea was it to have so much be reliable on one system?’ one user wrote. 

‘That is really bad practice. I literally can’t do my job because it’s down again.’

This comes after Microsoft’s Azure platform was compromised by a CrowdStrike update on July 19 that caused banks, airlines, television networks, trains and healthcare systems to report widespread outages.

Crowdstrike, a US-based cybersecurity firm used by Microsoft, deployed the update to its ‘Falcon Sensor,’ which searches for viruses and malicious attacks.

The incident impacted Microsoft’s 365 apps and Azure service that are used by more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies and eight of the top financial institutions across 43 US states.

Major government offices were forced to close including the Social Security Administration which said the incident had shut down numerous services.

The system failure has also impacted TD Bank, Visa and Bank of America as clients grappled with not getting hold of their money and hospitals across the US were forced to turn patients away and delay or reschedule procedures.

Microsoft has not stated what caused its most recent outage or if CrowdStrike is at fault. 

DailyMail.com has reached out to Microsoft for comment. 

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