Microsoft Outage Locks Users Out of Office Suite, Email

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Jason Redmond/ Getty

A recent issue with Microsoft’s Office 365 platform left many users completely locked out of Microsoft Office, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams which many have used as their primary means of work communication during the coronavirus pandemic.

TechCrunch reports that Microsoft has begun investigating an authentication outage that looked Office 365 users out of the platform preventing them from accessing Microsoft products such as Office, Outlook, and Teams.

Microsoft’s status dashboard stated that the issue started at 2:25 p.m. PT on Monday and impacted users across the globe for hours. Microsoft stated that some government users may be impacted by the issue, which may have impacted 911 communications in 14 states. The company stated in a series of tweets that it attempted to fix the issue but was forced to roll back its changes after the fix failed.

Around 5:40 p.m., Microsoft stated that it was “seeing improvement for multiple services” after earlier “rerouting traffic to alternate infrastructure to improve the user experience while we continue to investigate the issue.”

Still, millions of U.S. and Australian users had trouble accessing Microsoft’s services. Breitbart News recently reported that ironically Microsoft’s referral to the video-sharing app TikTok as a “security risk” may have played a major role in the U.S. tech giant losing a bidding war for the Chinese-owned app.

Breitbart News reported that concerns among major backers of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, including Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, over the financial hit that the company may take from selling TikTok for less than it was worth led to TikTok CEO Yiming Zhang choosing to form a partnership in the company with Oracle rather than outright divestment.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

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