Microsoft experienced a major cloud outage for the second time in two weeks

Microsoft suffered its second major cloud outage in less than two weeks.

Late Monday night in Redmond, Washington, where the tech giant is based, it reported that several services, including Outlook.com webmail, had become inaccessible to users in North America and beyond. The break lasted until Tuesday.

The Downdetector website, which aggregates reports of website and service outages, shows an increase in user reports of Outlook problems as of 3:24 UTC.

The outage appears to only affect Microsoft’s consumer-facing services. Outlook.com is its free webmail service, formerly called Hotmail, and is not the same as Outlook for Web, or OWA, which is enterprise-focused webmail.

Microsoft says that ” Outlook.com functionality such as calendar APIs consumed by other services such as Microsoft Teams is also affected.” This appears to be a reference only to its consumer version of Teams.

Microsoft first confirmed its latest outage on Tuesday at 4:04 a.m. UTC, tweeting 20 minutes later: “We are investigating access and service issues for Outlook.”

Shortly after, Microsoft said the issue appeared to involve “recent changes” that affected “service functionality.” It has initiated “targeted reboots to parts of our infrastructure affected by the recent change” to try and resolve the issue.

Although the problem appears to involve infrastructure in North America, disruptions are still being seen around the world. “Users in additional regions beyond North America may experience some residual impact due to the parts of the infrastructure affected in North America,” Microsoft reported.

But as Microsoft continued to restart many systems, it reported seeing “incremental improvement from this issue for users in some of the additional affected regions.”

As of 9:37 UTC, Microsoft reported that services have not yet been fully restored.

https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/microsoft-experiences-second-major-cloud-outage-in-2-weeks-a-21134