In the second major service outage hitting Microsoft in less than a week, Outlook online users worldwide on Thursday reported facing problems accessing the service.
Microsoft has confirmed the outage after its initial investigation indicated that its India-based users were the primarily impacted audience.
"We've received reports of users experiencing issues accessing their Exchange Online accounts via Outlook on the Web. Our initial investigation indicates that India-based users are the primarily impacted audience. Further details can be found in your admin center under EX223208," says Microsoft's 365 status Twitter account.
"We've collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols. Additionally, we've identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide. Further details can be found in your admin centre under EX223208," says Microsoft's 365 status Twitter account.
"We’re reviewing recent changes to our service to further determine the cause of impact. Users may experience problems with various Exchange Online protocols including Outlook desktop, mobile devices as well as those dependent on REST functionality," it said.
"We've determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of impact. We've reverted the update and are monitoring the service for recovery," the company added.
"Rollback has mitigated impact for the affected features in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams (SI#MO223247). For impact to the Exchange service (SI# EX223208), majority of the users are seeing recovery and we’re taking measures to ensure full recovery for all our users worldwide," Microsoft 365 said.
The worst impacted regions include the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, besides India, according to Downdetector which offers real-time status and outage information.
This new incident comes after a major outage that impacted several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Office 365 and Teams earlier this week.
Microsoft blamed a software code issue for the incident.
The affected services included Outlook.com, Office.com, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams including Teams Live Event.
Earlier, Microsoft 365 users faced issues on Tuesday, unable to access Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams and more. It had begun some 12 hours ago, as many users took to social media platforms complaining that they were unable to "send messages, make calls, or join meetings" etc.
According to a status update posted by Microsoft on their website, "Users may be unable to access any services that leverage Azure Active Directory (AAD) including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Teams Live Events as well as Office.com. Additionally, Power Platform and Dynamics365 properties are also affected by this incident. Existing customer sessions are not impacted and any user who is logged in to an existing session would be able to continue their sessions."
