A major Microsoft 365 outage affecting customers in the Central US region starting 6 PM EST on July 18 has been attributed to an Azure configuration change by Microsoft. Note that this isn’t the same outage as the one caused by Crowdstrike’s faulty update, which has affected Windows systems worldwide.
The Microsoft 365 outage affected Microsoft Defender, Intune, Teams, PowerBI, Fabric, OneNote, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Windows 365, Viva Engage, Microsoft Purview, and the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Xbox Support confirmed that the issue also affected the Xbox Live service, preventing users from logging into their accounts.
The Microsoft 365 Status X account acknowledged the issue, claiming that an investigation was underway. Shortly after, all traffic to the affected services was routed through healthy infrastructure to alleviate the impact. Later announcements claimed a “positive trend in service availability.”
Microsoft later announced the preliminary root cause on its support page, claiming that “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads caused interruption between storage and compute resources, which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.”
While the issue has largely been fixed, the outage is still unresolved. The status page for Microsoft 365 continues to indicate a service degradation. The company is applying “mitigation actions to provide relief from the residual impact” affecting the remaining affected Microsoft 365 apps. Telemetry data suggests that a full recovery is underway, and Redmond is “closely monitoring” to ensure the progress continues.
Faulty configurations and Microsoft outages are old friends. Customers experienced a similar outage in January 2023 caused by a WAN (Wide Area Network) IP change and earlier in July 2022 after Redmond deployed a buggy ECS (Enterprise Configuration Service).
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