Microsoft Cloud Services Affected In Worldwide Outage: What Is The Cause?

Microsoft users across the world suffered another outage for four hours from 2.48 p.m. ET Wednesday, impacting Outlook.com and Outlook apps on mobile and desktop, Teams, Exchange and SharePoint.

Users could not access their emails or load Outlook.com on their browsers. They also had trouble accessing the admin center and syncing accounts across multiple devices.

The cause of the outage was identified as a recent configuration change. In a service message on Twitter, Microsoft clarified, “We have determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of impact.”

Microsoft also said in another Tweet that a recent change applied to its wide-area-networking (WAN) resources caused connectivity issues. It added that the team has added additional staff to deal with increased traffic on the admin center caused by the outage.

This was the second major shutdown of Microsoft’s services in less than a week. On Monday, Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, Team and other services were inaccessible to users for hours. While the issues were resolved shortly afterwards, the company did not mention the root cause of the problem. Last week, Microsoft Azure had also faced a technical glitch.

Services are back live for most people now and Microsoft said that it has rolled back the update and the service is recovering from the blow.