Microsoft 365 suite suffers outage due to Azure networking issues

Microsoft 365 customers are having trouble connecting to the service and seeing degraded performance due to networking infrastructure issues across Microsoft’s Azure cloud regions globally.

“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,” the company wrote on X, formerly Twitter, via its Microsoft 365 Status account.

Microsoft’s Azure Service status page also showed a service degradation warning and said that users who are able to access impacted services may experience latency while performing actions or operations.

That warning also lists the services affected, including the Microsoft 365 admin center itself, Intune, Entra and Power Platform.

Services not affected, according to the cloud status page, include SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Exchange Online.

The M365 Office service status portal also showed no signs of any services down. The site showed that all components of the suite, including M365 consumer, Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft-To-Do, Skype, Office for the web (consumer), Whiteboard, Phone Link, Teams (consumer), and Microsoft Lists, were all working normal.

A separate page showing Microsoft 365 network health status that enables users to check network connectivity, also showed no sign of any issues.

But third-party outage reporting service Downdetector.com had received reports from users suggesting that emails, calendars and other Microsoft 365 services were not working for them.

Microsoft’s Azure Service status page, which itself had stopped working at time of writing, also showed another entry suggesting that Azure’s networking infrastructure was experiencing issues, starting approximately at 11:45 UTC on July 30.

The page showed that networking infrastructure across all Azure regions were experiencing connectivity issues.

“We have implemented networking configuration changes and have performed failovers to alternate networking paths to provide relief. Monitoring telemetry shows improvement in service availability from approximately 14:10 UTC onwards, and we are continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery,” a separate page that reports Azure’s status in detail showed.

This is Microsoft’s 8th service status-related incident, according to the company’s service status page. It included the incident caused by a flaw in CrowdStrike’s security sensor software that cost users millions of dollars in repairs and lost business opportunities, because it caused some Azure Virtual Machines to fail to restart.

Last year was also riddled with outages for Microsoft 365 users. Azure’s service page shows that the last incident reported in 2023 was in September, when the US East region faced issues.