Office 365 users are suffering outages across the country today, with Microsoft confirming that they are experiencing issues that appear to be specific to users in the United Kingdom.
The outage comes weeks after the company suffered authentification issues that left thousands of users around the world locked out.
We're investigating intermittent connectivity issues specific to the United Kingdom under MO141928.
— Office 365 Status (@Office365Status) June 15, 2018
Office 365 is a collection of different applications aggregated under a common portal. Users have taken to Twitter to complain that the Email service within Office 365 is noticeably slow with some commenting that their Office 365 application is stuck on updating inbox.
While others are reporting problems with Office Find Time an application that highlights available schedule times in the users calendar. Other applications in Office such as Sharepoint are been reported as slow or unresponsive.
@Office365Status is there problem with SharePoint online in general today for all customers? its unresponsive, throwing random errors.
— Shankar Gurav (@twittsshankar) June 13, 2018
However, the bulk of the issues seem to be in the Email application of Office 365 with some users reporting delays of 30 minutes in sending and receiving emails, while others can not access their accounts at all.
The issues come just two days after Jared Spataro Corporate VP for Microsoft Office Marketing announced an array of planned updates in a blog post: “We’re pleased to announce user experience updates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook rolling out gradually over the next few months.”
Spataro highlighted that the updates will not happen all at once: “Instead, over the next several months we will deploy new designs to select customers in stages and carefully test and learn. We’ll move them into production only after they’ve made it through rigorous rounds of validation and refinement.”
At the time of writing the issues with Office 365 are contained to users within the United Kingdom.
Pete Banham, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast, told Computer Business Review: “Exact details have been unclear which highlights the danger of outsourcing your business email uptime to a third-party. Operational dependency on any single IT environment creates business risks that need be considered carefully.”
He also highlighted the need to have in place a contingency plan to deal with these types of outages that can have a severe impact on businesses operations: “Anyone outsourcing a critical communication service like email must consider a cyber resilience strategy that assures the ability to recover and continue with business as usual.”
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