Microsoft Attributes Global 365 and Azure Outage to ISP

Microsoft is having another difficult week, as users worldwide have reported issues with Office 365, some Azure and Dynamics 365 services. Last week, a Microsoft 365 outage left users in Europe unable to access mailboxes for an entire day. Similarly, this time around, users reported that they couldn’t log into their accounts. Some US Government cloud resources were also down. The issue impacted users in the US, Japan, Australia and parts of Europe between 9pm GMT yesterday and the early hours of this morning. According to Microsoft engineers, the issue could be blamed on the Azure Active Directory (AAD), the company’s identity and access management cloud solution, which provide authentication services for all of Microsoft’s cloud services. External services using the ADD, such as LinkedIn, were also impacted. Users who are already logged into Microsoft services weren’t affected, but only those trying to log into new sessions experienced problems. On the Azure status page, Microsoft indicated that the source of the problem is with Level 3, an US-based ISP that provides connectivity and various other services to Microsoft data centers. “Engineers have identified an issue with Level 3 as an internal network provider,” the OS maker said. “Steps have been taken to fail over to an alternative DNS provider.”