Thousands of companies without access to e-mails: Microsoft Office 365 with worldwide disruptions

Since Thursday, thousands of companies - and a few private customers - have been struggling with problems with Microsoft's Office 365. Many users are currently unable to reach the login page because there is a problem with Microsoft's authentication server. The problem is already being worked on.

Some companies have been paralyzed intermittently since Thursday. Due to a widespread problem with Microsoft's popular Office 365 service, some users are currently unable to log on to the platform. In general, users from Europe, the Middle East and Africa are affected. After my own tests and research, some companies with Microsoft Office 365 servers in Germany and Austria have reported problems to me. However, some servers do not seem to be affected - this is how the service or login works for some users proflawless. For example, a user reports to Heisethat his entire company can't really work right now. Access to the webmail (OWA) or Outlook itself is not possible.

Reason known, interference suppression is in progress

As Microsoft has already announced on Twitter, the problem is due to parts of the domain controller. This service is responsible for the central authentication of users. Since Friday morning, there has also been a disruption to the Exchange authentication service. Microsoft calls its email service this. Companies and others who host their Microsoft infrastructure themselves ("on-premises") are not affected by this problem.

We've determined that a subset of Domain Controller infrastructure is unresponsive, resulting in user connection time outs. We're applying steps to mitigate the issue. More details can be found in the admin center published under EX172491.

- Microsoft 365 Status (@ MSFT365Status) 24 January 2019

Our telemetry data is indicating connection time outs within the Exchange authentication infrastructure, resulting in impact. More details are published under EX172491 in the admin center.

- Microsoft 365 Status (@ MSFT365Status) 25 January 2019

Affected companies can currently do nothing at all - even if it sounds stupid. You can only check the current status in the admin center and the Microsoft Twitter status account A comment on this which actually describes the problem pretty well: “As an IT person I think it’s great, in the past there were night shifts and time pressure when problems arose […], today I refer to an article on heise.de and go to the weekend at 12 on Friday, I can’t do anything anyway.” – said a user in the forum of Der Standard.

This is already the second major disruption at Microsoft in a short period of time: Last year at the end of November there was a major disruption at Microsoft's OneDrive service. There was a problem with the registration of users who had a Two-factor authentication activated. We'll keep you informed here.