Microsoft Office 365 Takes Its Second Major Outage, Microsoft Still Has No Idea About What Cause The Issue

Microsoft's online services have suffered another major outage this week, causing widespread logging issues for that user who trying to access various Microsoft's online services. Some of the affected Microsoft's web services include Azure, Skype, Outlook.com, OneDrive, Office 365, Windows Store, and Xbox Live. The outages started around 1:00 pm Eastern Time, affecting users on the US Eastern seaboard and some parts of Europe.

DownDetector, which provides real-time status and uptime monitoring of various online services, has logged almost 200 Microsoft outage-related reports, thus confirming the Microsoft outage. According to Business Insider, the latest outage, which started on Tuesday, March 21, is the second outage for the Redmond-based software company for this month. The software giant has also suffered similar hour-long outage on March 7 that has prevented users from accessing the company's various online services.

The widespread disruption is said to be reminiscent of an hour-long outage that hits Microsoft two weeks ago. In that outage, users with Microsoft Managed Service Accounts (MSAs) have also experienced same login problems with their MSA accounts. For a starter, MSA is the company's single sign-on service that authenticates users so that they can log into the various Microsoft web services.

During the hour-long outage, Microsoft users across the world have quickly turned to Twitter to vent their frustrations over the latest service disruption, saying that they're having some logging issues in some services. The Microsoft Office 365 team has posted on the Office 365 status page on March 21 at 12:15 p.m. Eastern Time, acknowledging the issue. However, the team didn't offer an expected resolution time and made no further comment about the outage story.

At 3;30 p.m. Eastern Time, Microsoft users started to report some good signs of life--they're now able to sign in to various Microsoft online services. Additionally, Microsoft online services such as Azure, Office 365, Outlook.com, OneDrive, Xbox Live and the Windows Store have all started to report that the issues have finally been resolved and their respective services are now running and back on normal.

Microsoft, which still reeling from the first outage, would not make any further comment on the reasons behind the MSA authentication issue. Until now, the company has no clear explanation about the cause of the outage. Stay tuned for more updates folks.