Yes, you read that right — Microsoft 365 went down.
On Tuesday, the company reported outages in Microsoft 365, which consists of Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive. More specifically, Microsoft 365 admin center, Intune, Entra, Power Platform, and Power BI were failing — though SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Exchange Online were unaffected.
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On the Outages email list, which tracks internet failures, administrators reported that “OAuth requests are flowing, but quite slowly. My users are able to authenticate, but some login flows are taking upwards of 10 minutes to complete and, at times, will look stalled.”
The company acknowledged the outage in an X post and directed users to the admin center for details — though, as some X users pointed out, the admin center also appeared to be affected by the outage.
We’re aware of issues with https://t.co/Htn4qQDPCR. Please view MO842351 in the admin center for more details about this incident.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 30, 2024
According to ZipDo, a software marketing company, Microsoft 365 has over 258 million users, while Statista reports that Microsoft 365 is used by over a million companies worldwide. In short, this was a big deal.
What’s caused the outage? We don’t know. Security expert Kevin Beaumont speculated that it was a botnet-generated, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. That could explain why the service outage continued for such a long time before being fixed.
As bad as this news was for the company, the worst part may have been that this major failure happened on the same day that Microsoft’s earnings are due. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
