Microsoft fixes a bug impacting Office 365 services

by Don Sharpe

Author

February 6, 2020

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Microsoft said it had fixed a glitch that had affected Office 365 on Wednesday, denying its users access to multiple mission-critical services. The announcement comes after dozens lamented on social media that the Windows 10 desktop search tool was no longer working.

Microsoft said it would look into the matter

In response to user complaints Wednesday morning, Microsoft had promised to look into a possible “access and latency issue” impacting several Microsoft 365 services. The company directed affected customers to the platform’s admin center for more information.

It later announced on its Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account that it had fixed the problem after rerouting user connections.

We rerouted user connections and validated that impact associated with MO203172 has been remediated. Additional details can be found within the admin center.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) February 5, 2020

Earlier on, Microsoft did not seem to get the impact assessment for the bug right. While it had claimed that the issue was specific to users accessing Microsoft 365 services from Europe, one customer pointed out that the glitch had affected users on a global scale.

Microsoft acknowledged later that the issue could affect any user.

Multiple issues reported

The bug appears to have locked some users out of their Office 365 accounts. Others said they could not enter their passwords via the provided online user portal.

Another user complained about multiple sign-in failures that made it impossible for end-users to utilize “resources for AzureAD and Office 365.”

The root cause

According to this admin center screenshot, Microsoft told its customers that a third-party networking fiber service went down, causing the bug. It is not unusual for cloud providers like Microsoft to build redundant networking, storage, or data processing capacities with the help of third parties.

These redundancies present an effective fallback plan in the event a critical service experiences disruption.

It looks like the software company has to start looking for a new fiber networking partner it can count on in the future in an hour of need like now.