Microsoft 365 Restored After Global Outage Linked to Third-Party ISP

The company quickly addressed the matter, attributing the disturbance to a modification made by a third party internet service provider

Microsoft’s popular cloud-based productivity suite, Microsoft 365, experienced a widespread outage on Thursday evening (September 12), affecting thousands of users globally. According to Downdetector, there were over 18,000 reports of issues in India and over 90,000 reports in the US citing the outage of services including Word, Excel, and Teams. Other Microsoft services, such as Azure, Xbox, Bing, and the Microsoft Store, were also affected by the outage.

The company quickly addressed the matter, attributing the disturbance to a modification made by a third party internet service provider (ISP) in its "managed-environment." In a statement on X (formerly twitter), Microsoft confirmed the situation was being resolved: “We’ve confirmed that a change within a third-party ISP’s managed-environment resulted in impact. The ISP has reverted the change, and we’re now seeing signs of recovery.” According to the company, the problem has been solved and operations have been restored as of the moment. Microsoft confirmed that they have carefully monitored their systems to make sure that the damage was entirely fixed and that the issue affecting connectivity to their services had been solved. This instance highlights the risks that can originate from third-party suppliers. Two months ago, a major outage occurred due to a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that affected roughly 8.5 million Windows devices.

Microsoft has assured consumers that they are keeping a careful eye on the situation in order to prevent further disruptions.