Microsoft 365 Outage Azure Struggles

After the total failure of Microsoft 365 a few days ago, the group has now published a report intended to explain the cause. It looks like planned maintenance and an unforeseen effect were to blame for the world’s troubles.

This year is really not off to a good start for Microsoft 365. There have been far-reaching problems with the Office platform several times. Skype and Teams and all Office applications were affected. There is currently another problem with the Azure cloud, which should not be solved until Monday, January 30th.

According to current knowledge, only some Azure subscriptions are affected. Microsoft is now trying to provide clarification as to how the problems came about. In all cases, Microsoft names the reason “changes in the network configuration”.

The list of services affected by the outage included Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, PowerBi, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Microsoft Defender for Identity.

Microsoft says the five-hour global outage earlier this week was caused by a router IP address change that caused problems in forwarding packets between all other routers on its wide area network (WAN). There were problems accessing the affected Microsoft 365 services. The problem resulted in a “wavy impairment,” it said. What is meant by this is that the problems are becoming more and more potent.

Microsoft changes maintenance plans

At times, the effect had escalated to such an extent that not even the status pages of the Microsoft services were accessible and only displayed “504 Gateway Time-out” messages. The error was only fixed after a good five hours and the services were accessible again – a real debacle for the group. After this incident, Microsoft announced that it would block the execution of commands affecting high levels and bind the execution of commands to the policy for safe configuration changes.