Microsoft’s Office 365 back from outage lasting several hours

A Microsoft spokesman did not have any information on the cause of the interruptions or the time it will take to get the services up and running again. PHOTO: AFP

NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - Microsoft Corp's Office 365, Teams and some of its other online services experienced service interruptions lasting several hours before being resolved on Monday (Sept 28).

A company spokesman confirmed the outages, which also impacted Exchange Online and OneDrive.

He didn't have any information on the causes.

Problems with some of the services were reported earlier on Monday by Downdetector, which aggregates user reports of issues.

That suggests the outages had lasted a number of hours before being taken up by Microsoft's recovery team, though they have since been resolved, according to the company's status updates.

Office 365 packages popular Microsoft software such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel into an online subscription.

Teams is a chat and collaboration tool that integrates with Office 365, similar in function to Slack Technologies Inc's titular service.

The disruption follows a similar incident last week when some users of Google's G Suite cloud productivity tools experienced errors.

Downtime in online services is likely to be more disruptive at the moment because so many people are working and studying remotely.

Microsoft and Google's offerings are widely relied on by schools and other educational organisations, which have shifted to conducting classes over the Internet during the pandemic.

Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.