- Just a few days after its biggest global outage ever, Microsoft’s online service is down again.
- Thousands of users have reported trouble using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Azure services since 1 PM today.
- The company has acknowledged the issue and said that it’s working on it. Timeout issues might be experienced while the repair is ongoing.
Just a few days after the global Microsoft outage that wreaked havoc in multiple countries, the company’s online services have been hit by another huge outage.
Some users have reported that they are not able to access their emails and thousands of others have reported trouble using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Azure services since 1 PM today.
The issue has been acknowledged by Microsoft.
“We’re currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features. More information can be found under MO842351 in the admin center.”- Microsoft
The issue is seemingly caused by a faulty network infrastructure. The company also added that while the repair job is ongoing, users might experience some timeout issues, especially while connecting to Azure.
The Previous Outage
The last global outage was caused by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company. Basically, it was trying to update its software but unfortunately, the update file had a bug that crashed Microsoft’s internal systems.
More than 8.5 million devices were impacted by this outage which spread across the UK, US, India, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, and many more.
- The aviation industry took the worst hit. Flights had to be either cancelled or delayed which led to unmanageable crowds at the airports.
- Supermarkets had trouble processing card payments.
- Hospitals and pharmacies couldn’t pull up patient information.
Cybercriminals also took advantage of the situation and started sending out phishing emails, pretending to be CrowdStrike’s customer support agent. Some even created fake websites that promised to help customers “fix” the issue for free.
While the issue was resolved, it led to a massive loss of $5.4 billion, affecting 25% of US Fortune 500 companies.
CrowdStrike did issue a $10 voucher to its employees to acknowledge the hard work they’d put in during the crisis. However, the vouchers didn’t work.
The insurance industry is also expected to be hit, as experts believe many businesses will file for Business Interruption Claims. Delta Air Lines is also planning to sue CrowdStrike for the losses it had to incur due to the outage. Seeing this, more businesses might follow suit.
