Office 365 Outlook Users Hit With Log-In Problems -- Redmondmag.com

Office 365 Outlook Users Hit With Log-In Problems

By Kurt Mackie
03/24/2017

Users of Office 365 services experienced connection problems late Friday afternoon, with outages seemingly concentrated in the western U.S. states.

Update 3/27: The problems were reported by users as resolving at around 6:00 p.m. on Friday, with Microsoft issuing portal statements around 8:30 p.m. that "email services are now operational." Microsoft's Twitter page had little information, but referred to "MO97271" for more information.

Problems regarding Office 365 use spiked after 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time, according to crowdsourcing data put together by the DownDetector.com Web site, which tracks user complaints. A heat map produced by DownDetector showed that the complaints were most concentrated in the Southern California region, San Francisco and Seattle.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Office 365 outage heat map of 3/24. Source: DownDetector.com.

DownDetector users reporting getting log-in errors, such as this one:

Sorry, but we're having trouble signing you in.
We seem to have encountered a transient error. You may try again.

Additional technical information:
Correlation ID: 7ac89627-469f-44a1-ad4e-7aef38989c79
Timestamp: 2017-03-24 22:07:36Z
AADSTS90033: Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.

Data polled by DownDetector indicated that users complained about log-in problems (34 percent), server connection problems (34 percent) and Outlook problems (30 percent). The problems started today at 5:41 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, according to the site. It appears to be an unresolved log-in problem that is continuing into early Friday evening.

Microsoft seems to be signaling that it'll send its next progress report on Saturday, March 25 at 1:30 a.m. UTC, according to a comment posted at DownDetector.

Microsoft provides a service health dashboard for organizations managing Office 365 services, which will show service outage information. However, Microsoft's only public resource page for Office 365 indicated that "everything is up and running" at around 5:00 p.m. PT. The public portal was not indicating any service problems.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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