Microsoft Office 365 Outage Hits Users Across The U.S.

A problem with Azure Active Directory appears to have locked users from across the U.S. out of their Microsoft Office 365 accounts Monday afternoon, halting many businesses in their tracks.

The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter feed reported at 5:44 pm ET: “We‘re investigating an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We’re working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly.”

On the Microsoft 365 Service health status page, Microsoft said it identified the problem and was reverting a recent change in an attempt to remedy it.

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One IT director told CRN his company’s employees were locked out of all Office 365 services, including Outlook email.

Microsoft customers started reporting their inability to access Office 365 on Downdetector.com at 5:21 pm—within an hour, more than 18,000 posts documenting those problems had flooded the website that tracks cloud outages.

Azure Active Directory is Microsoft’s identity and access management service through which users sign in to their cloud accounts.

On the Microsoft 365 Service health status page, Microsoft said existing sessions didn’t appear affected by the outage.

“Affected users are encouraged to keep existing sessions going and to avoid re-authenticating to Microsoft 365 services. Any Microsoft 365 service that leverages Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication may be impacted by this issue,” the page reported.