Microsoft 365 Service Disruption
What Happened?
As you’ve likely already seen, Microsoft are experiencing outages to a number of their services including Outlook and Teams. While initial fears may have been that this was caused by a cyber-attack, Microsoft have confirmed that this is not the case and put it down to an “elevated load” on its infrastructure. The company has pledged to publish full details of the root cause once the issues are fixed.
While the level of access to these services varies from customer to customer, many are reporting being unable to send or receive emails, access certain files, or communicate using Teams.
What Have Microsoft Said?
In its latest service update, Microsoft showed optimism regarding a fix for the ongoing outage, saying “We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue”. The company also reported “positive results” after applying a patch to 365. This is welcome news after an earlier statement where it claimed that initial attempts to create a fix were “not taking as expected”.
The timeout for emails has also been extended to 48 hours as a result of the disruption, in an attempt to preserve delayed emails during the outage.
Microsoft are encouraging users to be extra vigilant of bad actors attempting to use the outage as an opportunity to send out phishing attempts, password resets, and fake WhatsApp messages. They urge anyone experiencing these to report anything they come across.
