Thousands of Users Struggle With Microsoft’s Productivity Suite Outage

• On Thursday (September 12), Microsoft's productivity suite was down for thousands of users.
• The issue was caused by a change made by an ISP in their managed environment"
• The problem has now been resolved and things have gone back to normal.

Microsoft's Productivity Suite, which consists of Word, Excel, and Teams among others, was down for thousands of users on Thursday (September 12). After the connection was restored, the company posted on X to inform its users.

We can confirm the issue impacting connectivity to Microsoft services is now mitigated," it said.

Cause of Outage

This outage was caused by a change within a third-party internet service provider's (ISP) managed-environment". After the ISP reverted the change, the system automatically started to recover.

There was another report from the Microsoft Azure cloud platform that customers had complained about having trouble connecting to Microsoft's services from AT&T networks.

However, this issue was also resolved. A spokesman for AT&T addressed the report and said that while they were facing temporary disruptions, services have been restored and everything is working perfectly.

Extent of Impact

According to Downdetector, more than 90,000 reports came in from the US itself. The number of cases coming in peaked at 23,000 but then slowly started dipping after the ISP reverted the change and Microsoft's team got into action.

As of 10:28 A.M. ET, the number of reports has dropped to 800. As for AT&T, approximately 4,000 users were impacted by it.

The Previous Outage

This outage comes just two months after Microsoft Windows was hit by the worst outage ever, impacting more than 8.5 million users.

It was caused by the popular cybersecurity company CrowdStrike which was trying to update its software for Windows. Unfortunately, the update file had a bug that crashed Microsoft's systems.

The consequences were horrendous. Multiple airline carriers either cancel or delay their flights. Supermarkets also face trouble processing card transactions and hospitals and pharmacies have a hard time retrieving patient records and other files.

Taking advantage of the situation, many threat actors launched phishing attempts.

Although this recent outage is much smaller compared to the one caused by CrowdStrike, such frequent technical issues do raise questions about Microsoft's practices.

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