Stormy Weather Microsoft 365: it’s caching on. You can work around some of the problems.
Stormy Weather Microsoft 365
We’re now into hour 4 of the Microsoft 365 outage. Folks cannot access the web apps (Excel, Word, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint) when they log into office.com. The main problem is with the app waffle in upper left hand corner.
You cannot even access the admin center to check service health from the main page.
You can access individual apps via their direct URL.
The direct URLs for the most popular apps are:
Outlook – outlook.office.com
Microsoft Teams – teams.microsoft.com
Word Online – microsoft365.com/launch/word
Excel Online – microsoft365.com/launch/excel
And the admin centre can be accessed from admin.microsoft.com . You can go directly to services updates via https://admin.microsoft.com/#/servicehealth. Microsoft is updating their Twitter account @MSFT365Status regularly but with fewer details.
I have one client who reported the problem started when their desktops apps on their mac stopped working and then couldn’t access the web apps either. Microsoft reports the outage is primarily affecting North and South American customers.
What’s the problem?
From their updates via Twitter and the admin center Microsoft is focusing their repair efforts on rolling back an update on April 17th and the caching infrastructure.
Folks who can access the web apps will see missing features like the search bar gone, settings gear gone and the waffle with no apps listed. Exchange Online email is running slow.
While there are actually fewer tech outages than before, major tech outages cost business more now due to increasing reliance on cloud services. I know some folks immediately point to cyber attacks any time a major services goes down. Reports show that cyber attacks only cause about 11% of reported outages.
Microsoft outages typically last anywhere from 2 to 8 hours.
Update
Problems resolved. Web apps functioning normally.
“We determined that a section of caching infrastructure is performing below acceptable performance thresholds, causing calls to gather user licensing information to bypass the cache and go directly to Azure Active Directory infrastructure, resulting in high resource utilization, resulting in throttling and impact,” Microsoft wrote in an advisory.
Microsoft added additional CPU power to resolve the problem as well as rolled back an update from earlier this week.
