Where are we now – Microsoft 363? Cloud suite suffers another outage

Final update Another week, another Microsoft 365 headache. Redmond this morning said in a tweet it is investigating yet one more issue that is making it impossible for some users to use the search functionality for a number of cloud-based services.

The services affected reportedly include Teams, SharePoint Online, and Outlook. The problem is ongoing and Microsoft isn't saying much more than that. It's unclear how far reaching the outage is.

The Register has contacted Microsoft to get more information.

DownDetector this morning reported a spike in complaints about a Microsoft 365 outage just before 0800 ET (1200 UTC).

"Here we go again, our daily wake up call from M365," one user wrote, with another saying that the software giant is "making my case to move to Exchange Online difficult."

One user said their site was down because of the problem. Another said the outage was causing some confusion around SharePoint.

"Why is site usage data showing views, whereas hub usage is zero?" they asked.

One user in Ireland wrote on Reddit that the problem had been going on since 1000 local time.

The outage is only the latest to hit Microsoft this year and comes just days after a problem causing high CPU utilization rates in some of its infrastructure tanked the use of various services for many users who were unable to sign into their Microsoft 365 accounts.

For many, once they finally did get into their accounts, they were unable to see online services like SharePoint Online, Planner, Yammer, and Outlook on the web. Those impacted by the outage were served by the affected infrastructure, with most of the cases being in North and South America.

• Microsoft not a Teams player as admin center, 365 service suffer partial outage
• Azure blunder left Bing results editable, MS 365 accounts potentially exposed
• Microsoft breaks geolocation, locking users out of Azure and M365
• Microsoft's Outlook: Cloudy with a chance of junk-mail-stuffed inboxes

It took Microsoft much of the day to clear up that issue. The caching infrastructure was not performing at expected thresholds, which caused timeout exceptions in the Azure Active Directory infrastructure.

In March, Microsoft spent four hours dealing with an outage of Azure Resource Manager in Europe caused by a code change. In February, users saw Outlook crash for a while, and in January, a network change involving a route IP address change in its WAN affected a range of online apps, including Exchange Online, Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive for business.

We will update as more information becomes available. ®

Updated to add at 1915 UTC

"We've developed a fix to address the impact to the search feature, which we're currently validating internally to ensure it is efficient before deploying," Microsoft tweeted earlier.

"Additionally, we're exploring if an ECS configuration change may provide quicker relief."

Microsoft said it expected to take about an hour to test its update, and if successful, it would be applied across the affected environments to mitigate the issues.

However, Redmond later admitted it is “conducting final testing of the fix, and additional time is needed for validation. We've observed positive results from an interim change, and we're evaluating further updates to improve the experience.” So, stay tuned.

Final update

Microsoft, as of 0900 UTC, Tuesday, still hasn't quite fixed it all, but it's slowly getting there.

"We've confirmed that search availability has been returned back to the service for some tenants," the biz tweeted. "We are continuing implement our changes to fully restore availability. Refer to MO545600 in the Microsoft 365 admin center for more info."

Updated on April 25 to add:

Microsoft this morning tweeted at 1100 UTC that "we believe that the search functionality is now working for the majority of users. We're continuing to implement further mitigations to fully restore search functionality."