Major Outage Shuts Down Office 365 in U.S., Europe

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Huge parts of Microsoft’s online services were hit by an outage Tuesday afternoon, denying end users access to Office 365, OneDrive and other applications.

Website Downdetector.com reported that the outage began about 1:40 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday, with reports of widespread outages throughout the United States and Western Europe.

As of 6 p.m. ET, the Microsoft Office 365 Service health webpage indicated that users were continuing to have difficulty signing into the OneDrive file-hosting service.

“In some cases, after signing in to the service, users are then unable to access their OneDrive content,” the advisory said. “As the issue is intermittent in nature, users may be able to reload the page or make another attempt successfully.”’

A previous attempt to correct the problem was not completely successful, Microsoft said, and the company offered no timetable for getting the service back online.

“We've determined that the previously resolved issue had some residual impact to the service configuration for OneDrive,” Microsoft said. “We're performing an analysis of the affected systems to determine what further steps are needed for full recovery.”

By late afternoon, more than 1,500 frustrated users had posted of their difficulties on downdetector.com.

“Just outside London UK, complete failure to log into Office 365 or Onedrive,” wrote one user.

“The message that appears after you put your name in is ‘There was an issue with looking up your account. Tap Next to try again,’” the post continued. “This appears in-between your name and the chance to use your password.”

The outage was also affecting Microsoft's Xbox Live network.