Businesses grind to halt as essential Microsoft services go offline

Less than 24 hours after an outage to its office suite programs, Microsoft services have gone offline again, leaving businesses stranded.

Microsoft services have gone down for the second day in a row. AFP PHOTO / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Stephen Lam

It appears Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has brought bad luck with him on his trip to Australia as several of the company’s critical services go out for the second day in a row.

Several Microsoft 365 services that businesses and schools depend on are currently experiencing issues.

“We’ve determined that users may experience intermittent access issues with the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, and Yammer at this time. We’re continuing our investigation into the root cause and we’ll provide more information when we’ve isolated the root cause,” the outage alert on the Microsoft website reads.

Microsoft is expected to provide another update by 2.30pm.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is coincidentally in Australia today. Picture: Tobias Schwarz / AFP

It comes less than 24 hours after the company also experienced issues with its mail services that stopped businesses sending and receiving emails, including within their own organisations.

That issue was caused by an update that was supposed to improve the email system’s ability to identify and filter out spam but ended up filtering out more than it was intended to.

The problem was fixed overnight, but evidently, Microsoft now has a fresh one to deal with.

The company said it was “looking for the swiftest means of restoring access”, pointing organisational admins towards a portal where they could receive updates.

Unfortunately, access to that portal also appears to be down.

Yeah...um...no... no admin portal. Wish you guys would make your details available more openly, especially when you have TOTAL service outages like this. pic.twitter.com/vSpGNEon8B

— bprandall (@bprandall) November 20, 2019

Status update: we've noticed it's not working.

— Richard Watt (@scrichard) November 20, 2019

The company is holding a local developer conference in Sydney today focused on showing off how Microsoft’s cloud technology can have a transformative impact on businesses.

Speaking there this morning, Mr Nadella cited the company’s work with Qantas, CSIRO and Westpac as some examples of how Microsoft has facilitated a technological transformation for the organisations.

While cloud technology can have a massive impact on the way businesses run, as we are currently witnessing, it can also create new headaches when things don’t work how they’re supposed to.

Some users have reported their services being restored in recent minutes, but Microsoft is yet to issue a fresh update on the status of services as of 1.45pm.

Has the Microsoft outage brought your business to a halt today? Let us know in the comments below.