Microsoft 365 goes down – again

Yes, you read that right — Microsoft 365 is down. 

On Tuesday, the company reported outages in Microsoft 365, which consists of Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive. More specifically, Microsoft 365 admin center, Intune, Entra, Power Platform, and Power BI are failing — though SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Exchange Online are all working normally. 

Also: CrowdStrike caused Windows outage chaos for airports, banks, and more – what happened

On the Outages email list, which tracks internet failures, administrators reported that “OAuth requests are flowing, but quite slowly. My users are able to authenticate, but some login flows are taking upwards of 10 minutes to complete and, at times, will look stalled.”

The company acknowledged the outage in an X post and directed users to the admin center for details — though, as some X users pointed out, the admin center also appeared to be affected by the outage. 

According to ZipDo, a software marketing company, Microsoft 365 has over 258 million users, while Stastia reports that Microsoft 365 is used by over a million companies worldwide. In short, this is a big deal.

What’s causing it? We don’t know. Security expert Kevin Beaumont speculates that it’s a botnet-generated, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. That could explain why the service outage has continued for such a long time. 

Microsoft reports that it’s bringing the problem to heel, but it still isn’t completely fixed yet. Unfortunately, you’ll just need to wait until the company brings it back up (or consider switching to Linux Mint).

As bad as this news is for the company, the worst part may be that this major failure happened on the same day that Microsoft’s earnings are due. The timing couldn’t have been worse.