
Office 365 global authentication outage - Jedd
https://status.office365.com/
======
altmind
I'm just assembling the non-comprehensive list of office 365 outages or login
problems in the last seven months (r/sysadmin):

6days ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ajavl8/its_that_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ajavl8/its_that_time_again_anyone_having_office_365/)

1mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/a4w7ap/office365_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/a4w7ap/office365_outage/)

2mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9ygjpv/psa_micros...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9ygjpv/psa_microsoft_azure_mfa_is_down_limited/)

2mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/a0vepo/office_365...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/a0vepo/office_365_mfa_down_again/)

3mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9nbst7/office_365...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9nbst7/office_365_outage/)

4mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9cuwhs/loginmicro...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9cuwhs/loginmicrosoftcom_down_for_everyone_or_just_me/)

5mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9bihjl/office_365...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9bihjl/office_365_down_for_anyone_else_uk/)

7mo:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8r9y3w/365_outage...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8r9y3w/365_outage/)

~~~
PascLeRasc
I love the top comment: "Pretty sure It's Office 361 at this point"

~~~
mrmondo
If that, been an enterprise customer with a company that is a gold partner and
been using Office365 for 7 years now - it's down so often we stopped
monitoring it, easily the most flaky, unreliable, slow and poorly managed
online service I've personally used. (Words are my own, not necessarily those
of my employeer(s) etc...)

~~~
fro0116
You still can't actually change your billing country in Office 365 without
starting over with a new account. Even support can't do it.

[https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...](https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-admin/suggestions/11214702-add-
ability-to-change-country?page=1&per_page=20)

It's a complete shitshow.

~~~
realusername
It's the same on Azure, so I created a new account to circumvent that issue
and then they randomly banned me for doing that.

------
mrmondo
Update: This apparently affected all of Microsoft Cloud products - not just
Office365 as I stated in the title. Source:
[https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1090366788972404737](https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1090366788972404737)

*Edit: I believe this includes Azure-AD, which I would assume would affect people using it for auth for non-Microsoft cloud products (perhaps even on-prem (if people do that?)).

~~~
Haga
Cloud always was a single point of failure that's why it failed in the past
that's why it will fail when the first virus ignites a forest fire.

The truth is the users needs weight in little compared too drm and control of
pricing via shakedown methods.

~~~
robbyt
A well run service run by a world-class team will provide global availability
performance and service that small teams are incapable of.

However, in this case, I don't think the service is very well run, so there's
downtime. Not really an issue with "the cloud", this is just an issue because
of bad management and/or design of the system.

------
torstenvl
I wonder if this will be a wake up call to Microsoft to maybe allow offline
use of things like OneNote. It's really unacceptable to have something that
important so reliant on an online service.

(I doubt they'll change their tune. Theee years of complaints about this and
they still refuse to allow local notebook storage on Mac, so it seems unlikely
that they'd change their minds now.)

~~~
est31
Piracy of Microsoft products that allow offline use is rampant, especially in
poorer countries. A cloud service is a really good tool to prevent piracy.

~~~
rickycook
piracy is only an issue if it effects people paying for your product; if they
were never going to pay anyway, why not give it away for free? keeping a
digital product locked away out of spite is just... spiteful

especially when it comes to poor economies! the cost of a windows/office
license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary in some
countries! removing the tools that help them to compete with more affluent
economies is pretty poor form

~~~
est31
> the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire)
> yearly salary

In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local
yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses
for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows
and Office.

> removing the tools that help them to compete

You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be
with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of
hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux
and turns these people into second-class citizens.

~~~
z3t4
many software companies choose to upload "cracked" versions of their own
software ...

------
mrmondo
The status page reads as below (I've copied the text here as it a) may not be
accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed / edited, c)
this status page / information is usually pay-walled and only available once
you've authenticated):

\--

Microsoft 365 Service health status

Title: Unable to access Microsoft 365 services

User impact: Affected users are unable to authenticate to and access Microsoft
365 services.

Current status: We've received reports of an issue affecting access to
Microsoft 365 services. We've identified a degraded portion of infrastructure
that manages authentication requests and have restarted that infrastructure to
mitigate impact.

Scope of impact: This issue may potentially affect any of your users
attempting to access Microsoft 365 services.

Start time: Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at 9:15 PM UTC

Preliminary root cause: A portion of infrastructure that manages
authentication requests is degraded, affecting access to one or more Microsoft
365 services.

~~~
seekbeak
I love how they are just "turning it off and on again".

~~~
peterwwillis
It's pretty common practice for complex systems. If it's already dead, and
nobody knows what's wrong or how to fix it, you try restarting it. (normally
you first redirect traffic to a different region, but apparently big orgs are
still running critical infrastructure with changes that affect all regions and
can't be backed out)

~~~
londons_explore
Kubernetes doesn't even have a "restart this deployment" ability...

------
98codes
Looks like it's started with a DNS outage @ Level3:
[https://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/](https://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/)

~~~
zeeZ
My ISP (Telefonica) currently doesn't return addresses for
login.microsoftonline.de (cloud Germany) while Google's DNS servers do. I
wonder if that's related.

~~~
mrmondo
Interesting, I suspecting their 'restart' of 'authentication infrastructure'
may be a rolling restart and perhaps they have not got to Germany yet, perhaps
by using Google's DNS different 'authentication infrastructure' is being
provided?

------
grumblepeet
And, while this may not be connected, Microsoft also seem to have deleted all
of our Sensitive Information Policies in the Office 365 Security and
Compliance Center overnight too. Policies that we running yesterday all seem
to have been turned off or deleted this morning. This is a HUGE security risk.
As I say it could be coinicidence but I'm not so sure.

------
fredley
Christ I cannot stand Office 365.

For some reason, I cannot open files that are in my OneDrive folder without
O365 authentication shitting itself, and refusing to save files. This means to
edit files that are in OneDrive, I have to move them out of OneDrive, open
them, edit them and save them, then move the back into OneDrive.

The situation with having a different fucking login/account for every single
fucking Microsoft service (Skype, Office, etc.) _even when you 're on the
business tier for them all_ is insane and endlessly frustrating.

~~~
perlgeek
There seems to be an attempt at a single-sign on solution, but when I used it
about 2 years ago, it sent me a on trip to about 6 different domains
(live.com, microsoft.com, office365.com, something with sharepoint in the
name, and several subdomains of those).

In the past, I've given folks the tip to not open links if they send you to a
different domain than the link suggests -- by that standard, the SSO looks
like a complete scam. It takes some serious knowledge of the Microsoft
products to know that those domains all belong to the same corporate entity.

~~~
mavhc
Office 365 Message Encryption looks exactly like phishing. (and is also
useless as it doesn't have a second channel)

Good news: You can pay more to get phishing warnings in Office 365.... spooky

~~~
jedieaston
Can you clarify what you mean by second channel?

~~~
mavhc
You have to send the way to decrypt data via a different method than your send
the encrypted data, otherwise the person who can intercept one can intercept
the other.

If you email me a file which needs a password, and then the password, that's
pointless, you have to phone me or post me the password.

In MS's case the way you see the document is to login to MS's servers using
your email account (so an attacker could send a password reset), or an emailed
one time code (so an attacker can intercept and use it, either first, or if
they can change the intercepted channel, not pass it on)

------
a-dub
it was a marketing stunt! "hey everybody! you know that big google outage
today? we have a cloud too! it's big, and it goes down every once in a while
just like google's and amazon's! we're a real internet company now too!"

------
tonyedgecombe
Around the world millions of accountants were able to go home early as they
couldn't twiddle some cells in their spreadsheets, middle managers were spared
from death by PowerPoint and countless people weren't told about their use of
passive voice by Word's grammar checker.

------
bekimdisha
Funny enough, GMAIL had regional outages yesterday too.

~~~
conception
Or not funny. Suspicious coincidence. Hope it is just that and not outside
actors testing things.

------
flippyhead
Maybe it is just me but... The interest we here at HN have in showcasing
service outages seems like it's mostly because we want to point to some
big/other company and say "see they went down!" so we can feel better about it
when our own services go down.

~~~
brodsky
It may be that to a degree, but there is also a desire to point out
reliability deficiencies in a product or platform that inevitably gets pushed
down everyone's throats by management with low resistance to kool-aid.

------
code4tee
Microsoft’s auth infrastructure has been a hot mess over the last 12 month.
These outages are getting old.

------
mrmondo
The Office365 status page now states "There are currently no known issues
preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard."
and when you click the link and are forced to login (now that auth appears to
be working for me at least) you're presented with an error preventing you from
seeing service status or historical events stating "You don’t have permission
to access this page or perform this action."

Screenshots: [https://imgur.com/a/pALWiIR](https://imgur.com/a/pALWiIR)

------
DigiMortal
Could this have affected my ability to log into Skype for Business? I could
log in with my home wifi, but not my cell phone hotspot. Didn't think much of
it at the time!

~~~
mrmondo
Yes, Skype / Skype for business uses Microsoft’s centralised servers including
for authentication.

------
mrmondo
This also impacted "US government cloud resources":
[https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1090379738424569859](https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1090379738424569859)

Also from ITNews: [https://www.itnews.com.au/news/microsoft-hit-by-global-
offic...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/microsoft-hit-by-global-
office-365-login-problems-518580)

------
aboutruby
> I would say is pretty fair and based on today’s events everyone affected
> could be eligible for 25% discount on their bill as the service credit for
> breaching 99.9% SLA is 25%

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ajavl8/its_that_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ajavl8/its_that_time_again_anyone_having_office_365/eevk047/)

------
jxdxbx
I need 365 since it can do some things Google docs can’t do.

But, a while ago there was a widespread bug making is so that some percentage
of people who had used the Mac or iOS apps couldn’t sign in. It was never
officially acknowledged, and only fixed due to random people getting
journalists to write about an emailing randome people on other teams within
Microsoft.

Their cloud stuff is good but the auth and account stuff is a total mess.

------
sqd
Not sure if it is related, but the safelink service (the thing that wraps a
link with a jump) is down at my school's mail service (that uses MS suite).

------
phs318u
Someone pointed me to this [0], and I wonder if it is related? Maybe Microsoft
tried some changes in response?

[0] [https://medium.com/@lukeberner/how-i-abused-2fa-to-
maintain-...](https://medium.com/@lukeberner/how-i-abused-2fa-to-maintain-
persistence-after-a-password-change-google-microsoft-instagram-7e3f455b71a1)

------
yegle
Lovely, there's this link on the page (doesn't work on Chrome): Add this page
to your favorites

~~~
ronsor
It's using the old IE window.external

------
forgotAgain
Ironic to read all the negativity here when on the day after the OP Microsoft
will announce quarterly earnings which will undoubtedly be driven by continued
"Enterprise buy in to Microsoft Cloud Solutions".

------
synaesthesisx
Glad I purchased a standalone license (although I do have Office365 through
work).

~~~
mrmondo
Does that mean that you don't (ever) have to login to Microsoft / Office365
online services with the desktop software? I have been hearing that people are
having issues with desktop apps asking them to log back in to use them - and
they can't.

~~~
acid303
You don't have to log in anywhere. MS sells Office 365 and Office 2019, 365
being a subscription service and 2019 a one-time purchase. People you talk
about probably had issues with desktop apps that were a part of O365.

------
mrmondo
and today Microsoft's "Xbox live" cloud service is down and it's causing
Xbox's to fail to boot: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/xbox-one-black-
screen/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/xbox-one-black-screen/)

------
lisper
I'm still using my copy of Office2008. It still works just fine. It never has
an "authentication outage". And, as a bonus, it costs me nothing to continue
to use it. I would feel sorry for all of the poor shmoes who are locked out of
their office suites, but I'm sorry, you brought this no yourselves when you
accepted a subscription model. If people just said no to the subscription
model, no one would have this problem.

~~~
deusex_
Your personal home use case of Office is not really relevant here. Good luck
organizing a huge company on that.

~~~
lisper
Companies are even more relevant because they have more leverage as buyers.

------
pointytrees
I see these comment sections get somewhat rowdy and negative. Anyone care to
comment on the other side of things?

Are there any "it may be down, but it is up quite often and saves us heaps of
time and labor, totally worth the occasional outage" type experiences?

We're considering G Suite and O365 soon.

~~~
altmind
Yes, there are some great things about O365.

For example, I often hear that O365 licenses are a bliss compared to
complexity of microsoft enterprise licensing, when even ms reps don't agree
how much licenses you need.

~~~
techfoolery
To be fair, "the licensing isn't completely miserable like their other
product" isn't exactly a selling point.

My two cents from what I've seen (note mainly see GSuite sie of things).. You
can get much more productivity & actual collaboration with G Suite, dependent
on a few factors.

One, there has to be total buy-in @ the executive level because you most
likely need to completely re-think how work gets done across every function.
Often, we do what we've been doing and don't see the full picture because of
that existing perspective.

So that requires a legit G Suite partner to help execute change management as
for O365 I imagine. It's not so much a risk unless you do it for the wrong
reasons; They've done it enough times to have a proven migration formula.
Saving licensing costs for example should be on the bottom of your
considerations because that more or less evens out and becomes irrelevant.

------
jammygit
I know people make a big deal out of availability, but I personally don't
usually mind that much when things go offline. I'm sure it could cause serious
problems in specific situations though

------
post_break
Does anyone know how to get office 365 pro plus installed on a server to stop
deactivating itself? Should we have just paid the insane amount for office
enterprise or whatever the one time fee version?

------
jenna_talia
How is it that everyone keeps screwing themselves with MSO when even if you
pay for commercial use for libre office you come out way ahead. If you want to
collaborate on a document or spreadsheet, you dont need to prostitute yourself
to microsoft, its a case of being so self important and lazy that one more
click or shifting between a telepresence application and an office suite
application is to hard. All you people complaining about being down because
msoffice products are unavailable need to get a grip on how to use a computer.

~~~
mrmondo
While I agree with your sentiments about the products, MS as a company and
their software model, some of us are forced to use their products at work and
of course some of us have tried to improve things and move away to more
standards based and ethical software we don't always win (no pun intended)
(and words are my own etc...)

------
shereadsthenews
Incredibly this has taken down typingclub.com

------
ed_elliott_asc
Www.dayssincelastazuremajoroutage.com is constantly down because it is hosted
on azure

~~~
mrmondo
Said domain is not registered, While I suspect your comment is just aimed at
being humorous it may be taken by some as a bit of a troll comment.

