Microsoft has been hit by a global outage less than two week since its systems were brought down by a bug-riddled update that sparked chaos for millions.
The disruption is impacting emails, Xbox Live and 365 functions, all of which were knocked offline on July 19.
Reports about Tuesday’s problems surfaced around 9:15am ET.
Microsoft’s service status website shows an alert for ‘network infrastructure,’ which is critical for connectivity and communication between users, apps, devices and the internet.
The previous outage was triggered after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity software company, but the current issue has not yet been linked to the firm.
‘We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally. Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services,’ Microsoft said in a post on X.
‘We have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue. More details will be provided as soon as possible.’
Microsoft said on the admin center that its Azure services are down and ‘a subset of customers may experience issues connecting to … services globally.’
Azure is a cloud firewall security service that provides threat protections for files, data and other apps.
Microsoft also reported that its Intune platform – which manages companies’ organizational resources – and Entra have been impacted.
Entra is a cloud-based identity resource that provides authentication and authorization services for Microsoft Azure, 365 and other third-party services.
The company added that its Power Platform has also been implicated, which helps businesses build applications, analyze data and automate workflows.
This service also includes GitHub, a developer platform, and Microsoft Teams that is widely used by companies across the globe.
DownDetector has received hundreds of reports from users since 8am ET who have complained that they can’t access their email on the app or in a browser and people aren’t receiving scheduled calendar invitations.
The admin center said it will issue another update at 11:30am ET and that they currently ‘have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue as soon as possible.
‘We’ve identified multiple workstreams and are working to mitigate impacted workstreams by performing failover operations.’
The company said in an updated post: ‘We’re analyzing traffic patterns within a section of a networking infrastructure to assist our investigations.
‘Additionally, we’re reviewing mitigation options, including potential failovers [server backup], to provide relief.’
People have taken to X to complain about the outage with one person writing that both their Xbox and Minecraft are down.
‘Who at Microsoft’s bright idea was it to have so much be reliable on one system?’ one user wrote.
‘That is really bad practice. I literally can’t do my job because it’s down again.’
This comes after Microsoft’s Azure platform was compromised by a CrowdStrike security update, which caused banks, airlines, television networks, trains and healthcare systems to report widespread outages.
Crowdstrike deployed the update to its ‘Falcon Sensor,’ which searches for viruses and malicious attacks.
The incident impacted Microsoft’s 365 apps and Azure service, which are used by more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies and eight of the top financial institutions across 43 US states.
