The recent disruption to Microsoft 365 services resulted in users being unable to access their apps for the sixth time this year.

Users had reported difficulties in accessing their Outlook mailboxes, and connection attempts to Microsoft 365 servers were unsuccessful. The company acknowledged these issues in a notification, stating, “User reports indicate that the disruption primarily affected users in North America, Poland, and the United Kingdom, although it’s possible that users from other regions were affected as well.”

Twitter saw a significant backlash against the company, primarily due to the frequent occurrence of such disruptions in Microsoft 365 services. As per Microsoft’s service status page, at the time of reporting, Outlook, Skype, and Teams were experiencing difficulties. Issues included unexpected duplication of contact lists for Outlook and Teams users, and difficulties making outbound calls to Chinese numbers on Skype.

A Troubling Series of Microsoft Outages in This Year

This most recent interruption is the sixth such occurrence for Microsoft this year. All of the service disruptions so far have involved at least a portion of the Microsoft 365 services.

On May 9, the company had reported an investigation into access issues with some Microsoft 365 services and features specifically for users in the UK.

In late April, Microsoft was looking into a problem causing users to be unable to utilize the search function across multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook on the Web, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook desktop clients.

Earlier in April, Microsoft users were unable to access Microsoft 365 web applications and Teams. The company addressed errors within the caching infrastructure and excessive CPU utilization on backend navigation feature processing components, restoring the services subsequently.

In February, a global outage affected users, primarily those in North America, who could not access emails in Outlook or use the collaboration tool, Teams. Additional features like the calendar used by other services such as Microsoft Teams were also impacted.

In January, Microsoft had to resolve a global outage that affected various products and services including Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, along with Teams and Outlook. After two hours of the disruption, Microsoft reported that they were stepping back a network change which they believed was the cause of the outage.

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