Microsoft 365 cloud services are recovering from their second major outage of the week. The latest Microsoft cloud issues impacted customer service worldwide for nearly five hours, and involved Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint and Teams.
The outages, in turn, cause problems for thousands of channel partners, MSPs and technology vendors worldwide that depend on Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for customer communications and IT service desk integrations.
The latest outages and configuration issues appear to involve Microsoft code updates that didn't work properly. Microsoft resolved the October 1 issue by rolling back some of the code updates.
This is the second major Microsoft 365 outage of the week. The other occurred on Monday, September 28.
Microsoft Cloud Outage: October 1 Details and Timeline of Recovery
The October 1 outage timeline was as follows, according to the official Microsoft 365 Status account on Twitter:
- October 1, 2:03 a.m. ET: Microsoft received reports of users experiencing issues accessing their Exchange Online accounts via Outlook on the Web. The initial investigation indicated that India-based users are the primarily impacted audience.
- October 1, 2:49 a.m. ET: Microsoft collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to the company's Exchange online protocols. Additionally, Microsoft identified the issue to be affecting users worldwide.
- October 1, 5:43 a.m. ET: Microsoft determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests caused the service issue. Microsoft reverted the update (i.e., performed a software system rollback) and was monitoring the service for recovery.
- October 1, 6:46 a.m. ET: The rollback mitigated impact for the affected features in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. For impact to the Exchange service, the majority of the users are seeing recovery and Microsoft is taking measures to ensure full recovery for all users worldwide, the company said.
Stay tuned for more potential updates to this blog.
