Microsoft users experienced widespread issues when trying to access M365, Azure, GitHub and other online services, with the vendor pointing to a “networking configuration issue” as the root cause.
The issues began to appear at just after 6pm AEDT (7am UTC).
A status advisory confirmed that Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, PowerBI, Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Microsoft Graph were either degraded or inaccessible.
A separate advisory confirmed issues with Azure Networking, which caused problems for users trying to access a broad set of Azure services.
Another status advisory for GitHub points to “degraded performance” across multiple tools and services, including Actions, Codespaces, API Requests and Copilot.
Microsoft said it had identified what it believed to be the root cause.
“Customers may experience issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources in multiple regions, as well as other Microsoft services,” the vendor said.
“We’ve determined the network connectivity issue is occurring with devices across the Microsoft wide area network (WAN).
“This impacts connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centres, as well as ExpressRoute connections.
“The issue is causing impact in waves, peaking approximately every 30 minutes.”
Microsoft said that it had identified “a recent WAN update as the likely underlying cause, and have taken steps to roll back this update.”
“Our latest telemetry shows signs of recovery across multiple regions and services, and we are continuing to actively monitor the situation,” the company said at about 8.50pm AEDT, almost three hours after the problems first began.
The impact of the outage is global, with users in Oceania, Asia Pacific and further afield reporting problems.
iTnews’ own tests showed long load times for Exchange Online and Teams, though apps did eventually load and function.