Microsoft Outage Affecting Companies & Services in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, & New York

If you have had issues using Office 365, Teams, Minecraft, or playing games on your X-Box, it could be because of a massive Microsoft Azure cloud outage.

The outage has also affected several large businesses, including Costco and Capital One.

It looks like the worst of the problems may be over.

According to an article on the Yahoo! website, an outage that hit Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and its suite of productivity tools on Wednesday has started to ease,

Wednesday's outage follows last week’s Amazon AWS disruption, which caused widespread chaos across thousands of websites, including major platforms such as Snapchat and Reddit.

Microsoft 365 reported that its services were affected by issues stemming from the Azure outage.  According to its status page, a recent configuration change in part of the Azure infrastructure triggered the problem.  Knowing what the problem was, technicians immediately started working on fixes for the problem.

By early afternoon, the number of users reporting problems with Microsoft 365 had dropped to about 4,300 at 1:07 p.m. ET, down from nearly 11,700 earlier in the day.

Users experienced trouble accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center and delays when connecting to other services. Some also encountered issues with Outlook add-ins and network connectivity.

Much of the information about the outage comes from the Downdetector website.  It is important to keep in mind that those numbers are based on user reports and may not reflect the total number of people affected.

Last week’s AWS outage marked the largest internet disruption since the CrowdStrike malfunction last year, which crippled systems across hospitals, banks, and airports, underscoring the fragility of today’s deeply connected technologies.