Microsoft Office 365 in out of action for users around the world, with the company scrambling to isolate the root cause.
“We’ve determined that an authentication issue is preventing users from accessing the Office365 service. This issue is limited [sic] to the APAC, Japan and EMEA regions and we’re working to resolve it” the company said in a status update
“We’re analyzing diagnostic data to isolate the root cause of the Office 365 portal access issue. Admins check MO133518 for more details”, the company tweeted.
Pete Banham, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast, commented:
“Microsoft Office 365 was hit with major downtime on Friday, with customers around the world unable to access their services or admin portals. An operational dependency on the Microsoft environment creates business risks that need be addressed.”
He added: “Anyone outsourcing a critical service like email needs to consider who will suffer most from reputational damage, internal operational issues and financial loss. Mimecast is urging organisations to consider a cyber resilience strategy that assures the ability to recover and continue with business as usual.”
Network intelligence providers ThousandEyes said that they are looking into the issue.
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Their product marketing manager Ameet Naik, wrote about monitoring the service last night. He said: “Microsoft Office 365 is a bouquet of applications aggregated under a common portal, with a common look and feel. However, they are all distinct applications that share some common elements but may be delivered very differently.
He added: “Office 365 apps have their own distinct URLs and delivery architectures. Hence it is important to monitor each application separately. Some can be logically grouped; for example, the Live apps are all hosted on a common platform and share a hostname. However, Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online, OneNote and Azure Active Directory (AD) are all distinct URLs.”
He noted: “There’s no such thing as steady state in the cloud. Thriving in an Office 365 environment requires a new approach to monitoring – one that factors in rapidly shifting baselines, and networks and applications that you don’t control.”
The outage comes hours after Microsoft announced the introduction of new, advanced protection capabilities for Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal versions, with two new capabilities: Files Restore and Ransomware detection and recovery.
