Microsoft on Monday saw its SaaS-based Office software suite suffer an outage for the seventh time this year as users faced issues with Outlook Web, Teams, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint for over eight hours.
“We’re reviewing our networking systems and recent updates in an effort to identify the underlying root cause of the issue. Additional information can be found in the admin center under EX571516,” Microsoft said in a tweet.
In the following hour, the company tweeted again to inform its users that Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook Web, Teams, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint were affected due to the outage.
Another hour later, the company decided to stop the deployment of updates to Microsoft 365 and said the services were in recovery.
However, Microsoft 365 services were hit again just a few hours later.
“We’ve determined that impact associated with MO571683 and EX571516 has reoccurred and are investigating the cause. We’ll be providing updates related to this event under MO572252 in the admin center,” the company said in a tweet.
The issue was resolved over the following three hours, the company’s latest tweets showed.
About 18,000 users were affected at the peak of the outage, data from the internet outage tracking website Downdetector showed. The second outage saw over 5,000 users affected at its peak.
The service status page for Microsoft 365 also showed that Teams and Outlook were currently suffering from a duplicate contact list issue.
“This issue only impacts users who synced their personal account device contacts with Microsoft Teams. New syncs are no longer resulting in duplicate contacts since we've implemented the long-term fix,” Microsoft said, adding that users could either wait for Microsoft to clean up the duplicate contacts or follow a prescribed workaround.
Outages continue to plague Microsoft 365
The two outages on Monday are the company’s seventh downtime in the last six months.
Last month, the company reported that UK users were facing issues accessing some service offerings under Microsoft 365.
In April, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue where users may be unable to use the search functionality in multiple Microsoft 365 services. Outlook on the Web, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook desktop clients were among the affected services.
Earlier in the same month, users were unable to access Microsoft 365 web applications and Teams.
The company also suffered a global outage in February and yet again its users could not access emails and Teams. It had suffered a similar outage in January.