14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Office 365 suffered a major outage in Europe a few days ago, and earlier today, the productivity service was hit by even more issues in various regions.
This time, the problem affects the Safe Links service that Office 365 and Microsoft 365 uses to check the links that are included in email messages and Office documents to protect customers.
The service went down all of a sudden for all users, and whenever users clicked links in emails or documents, they were provided with a blank page reading “Service unavailable.”
Microsoft confirmed the problem in a tweet posted by the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account.
“We’re investigating an issue where some users are unable to access URLs from emails,” the company said in one tweet, only to further add a few hours later that it was working to resolve the problem.
“We determined that a portion of Safe Links infrastructure is not operating as expected, causing some users to be unable to access URLs. We're rerouting traffic to provide relief.”
Second problem hitting Microsoft 365
While this problem was resolved, another issue was discovered, and later acknowledged by Microsoft, this time blocking customers from access Microsoft 365 services.
“We're investigating an issue in which users may be unable to access Microsoft 365 services. We’re working to remediate the issue,” the firm confirmed. “We've identified a third-party network provider issue that is affecting authentication to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We're moving services to an alternate network provider to resolve the issue.”
At the time of writing this article, all problems should be resolved, though just like in the original outage report earlier this week, I’m still seeing some people struggling to access Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft’s status page indicates that all services are up and running normally.