Microsoft Hit With Office 365 Cloud Outage

Customers in North America were unable to access Exchange Online Wednesday evening, with some reports suggesting outage went global

Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service suffered an outage on Wednesday, knocking out email services for thousands of customers.

Microsoft confirmed the outage on Wednesday evening in the US.

Exchange issue

A Microsoft spokesperson said: “We are aware of an Exchange issue impacting some of our customers in North America. We are working quickly on a resolution.”

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the outage coincides with the firm’s Worldwide Partner Conference happening this week in Orlando, Florida.

microsoftProblems mainly consisted of users being unable to connect to Exchange Online, with emails unable to be sent or received. Problems were also reported in Canada and as far south as Mexico City.

A statement read: “This issue is now reported at Service Health Dashboard (SHD) as incident EX27794 starting at July 15, 2015, at 9:25 PM UTC. The user experience of this incident is: Affected users are unable to connect to the Exchange Online service when using multiple protocols including Outlook, Outlook Web App (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), and Exchange Web Services (EWS). Affected users may also experience delays when sending and receiving messages.”

Last year, Microsoft suffered from a two-day Azure cloud outage. The failure, which started on November 18, and appeared to last for up to two days for some regions, knocked out Azure storage, websites, and other services across US and Northern Europe. Even MSN and Xbox live were down, affecting thousands of users.

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