Microsoft's Web Services Have Been Hit with a Major Outage

Megalith

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“Something happened.” Major services that include Xbox Live and Office 365 are reportedly offline, although the only thing acting funky on my end is the Windows Store, which refuses to connect. The issues supposedly began over an hour ago—with my luck, everything will be restored the second I post this, but on the off chance it isn’t, know that it is MS’s servers that are farked and not yours.

Microsoft's online services, including Xbox Live, Outlook.com, Hotmail, Office 365, the Windows Store, OneDrive, and more, were hit with what appears to be a nationwide outage on Tuesday afternoon. DownDetector.com has logged almost 200 reports thus far confirming the outage. The Microsoft Office 365 service health dashboard acknowledges the problems and says that Microsoft is looking into it. It's the second Microsoft outage in March, after services went out for an hour in a similar fashion.
 
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This is why I only use outlook.com for throwaway junkmail/spam accounts. So much for "the cloud" when MS can't manage to avoid a single point of failure for all their services.

Might be time for MS to host Outlook.com on Gmail and move their Azure infrastructure to AWS so their services stay up.
 
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Trying to login to a hotmail/outlook account (yes I still have one for testing purposes) a few minutes ago I saw an SSL error. I dont remember exactly but I think it said the certificate wasnt valid for that (sub)domain.
 
Just think some day the MS os will all be in the cloud and if there is an outage your PC won't work. Calling it here first! :)
 
Cool. Thunderbird is downloading my whole Hotmail emails again.

Grrrr.
 
Yay for cloud services.

Join the revolution they said.

It's the wave of the future they said.

I'd rather be offline!


(Somebody better get that word play reference)
 
Just think some day the MS os will all be in the cloud and if there is an outage your PC won't work. Calling it here first! :)
And everyone with a system that still does function will be called a Luddite. Can't wait.
 
All my domains have been hosted with Google apps for Work for about 10+ years now and not once have I experienced such an issue. If this happened with my business domain I'd be up in arms!
 
Noticed this as I tried to log into an MS account to install Office for a client earlier...
 
Just think some day the MS os will all be in the cloud and if there is an outage your PC won't work. Calling it here first! :)
The way things are currently, you can't really do much work off the internet anyway. Same with gaming and Steam.
 
The way things are currently, you can't really do much work off the internet anyway. Same with gaming and Steam.
Steam's offline mode works pretty flawlessly, as long as you've launched the game at least once. Can't speak to any tacked-on services but in this respect, Valve has done gamers right.
 
May they only stay offline. Saves having to turn it all off on Windows 10. Sad for people who actually need to use some of the services.
 
Just think some day the MS os will all be in the cloud and if there is an outage your PC won't work. Calling it here first! :)

Ooh, there were a few of us saying the same as the idea for cloud based everything moved from select corporate infrastructure to the greater internet. When these things happen, a bunch of us reminisce about the good old days when it only affected a few twelve to fourteen thousand employees ... and laugh.
 
Hmmm..... all of our Office365 products (Exchange online, Sharepoint online and Skype for Business) as well as web access is all working just fine for us. I wonder if it is an outage only affecting the East coast again.
 
Hmmm..... all of our Office365 products (Exchange online, Sharepoint online and Skype for Business) as well as web access is all working just fine for us. I wonder if it is an outage only affecting the East coast again.

Seems to be working here too. Haven't seen any wide reported outages yet in our company. We've got some places located CST.
 
My company recently went from exchange servers to O365... In the Cloud! It sucks such balls. It's unbelievably slow.
 
so that explains why I had issues trying to log into my outlook account earlier today
for me it only lasted about an hour
 
My company recently went from exchange servers to O365... In the Cloud! It sucks such balls. It's unbelievably slow.

Completely opposite experience with our company and the clients we have converted to O365.
 
Or the folks who have installed office2016 outside of office365. That is still available...you just have to know hwere to look as MIcrosoft makes it very hard to find.

I never even heard of office 2016 before, interesting.

An old boss of mine went through such hell trying to switch over to office 365. He had to change his email address they told him from the one he's had his whole life (red flag 1) and so he did. But then he had trouble with his address book or something, anyway he was on tech support with microsoft he would regularly call every single day. And he would act so passively aggressive in the call, because he "couldn't believe" how inept they were for not being able to fix his setup. Of course he got a new person every time he called so he had to tell the whole story again every time. To this day as far as I know he still sending out batch emails telling people of his new address. Ah yes that was another issue he was having, for some reason he couldn't send more than 7 emails at once or something and so to email everybody in his address book to tell them of his new email address would take weeks.

On top of that he has some OCD and the whole situation was just incredibly comical for me. Just the tone of him on the phone, acting like he's so undignified to have to go through all this hahaha. Acting like he's better than what he's being put through and that it's on MS to fix it. I have never seen somebody have so much trouble with email in my life and he runs a tech business ahahaa. What a sap.

I still use office 2007 which I hated the interface of it when it came out but once you learn it it's actually fairly logical and works alright.
 
Does this include Groove? My phone app keeps saying "We're sorry, can't connect to music services right now" and closes the app. which is ridiculous because I used to be able to use the app even without an internet connection (to play my local music).
Now app just force closes. Even after I have re-installed on my Nexus 6P. I don't see any mention of Groove being down.
 
Hmmm..... all of our Office365 products (Exchange online, Sharepoint online and Skype for Business) as well as web access is all working just fine for us. I wonder if it is an outage only affecting the East coast again.

All of ours was working fine as well. Except we don't use MS's authentication, we do an AD sync from our local AD infrastructure. There was a fun warning from them the middle of yesterday about sharepoint service degredation becuase "things" were being created with timestamps of 1984.

I suspect they introduced some date issues and a bunch of certs flipped out about their validity and screwed up everything for lots of people.
 
But...but...but...they said the Cloud was the future?!?!?
Unfortunately Cloud being the future and it being unreliable with no recourse when it does go down are not mutually exclusive...
 
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