Microsoft consumer cloud outage blights Outlook.com and OneDrive users

Microsoft claims to have rectified the technical difficulties that left users of several of its consumer-grade cloud communication and collaboration tools struggling to log in on Tuesday 10 November.

Microsoft confirmed at 6.15pm on 10 November, via Twitter, that it was investigating the issue that, at that time, only appeared to be affecting users of its consumer-grade webmail service, Outlook.com.

In a subsequent tweet, the software giant said there was evidence to suggest that the issues were only affecting parts of its consumer cloud services portfolio, namely Outlook.com and its online storage service OneDrive, as well as Sharepoint Online users who logged in via guest accounts.

It is understood that those affected by the issue were greeted with error messages when attempting to log into Outlook.com, telling them the service was unavailable, while OneDrive users were unable to connect to the service at all.

User data accrued by outage monitoring website Downtime Detector logged a peak in reports of technical difficulties with these services at around 6.30pm and again just before 9pm on Tuesday evening, with users across the UK and Europe seemingly mainly affected.

The issues also coincided with service trouble elsewhere within the Microsoft consumer cloud family, with users of its Xbox Live online gaming service reporting problems at around the same time, across Europe and the US.

According to reports, this downtime may have been related to a surge in users flocking to the Xbox Live platform to register and set up their new Xbox Series X and Series S devices, which launched yesterday.

Computer Weekly contacted Microsoft for further details on the cause of the outages, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

However, a post on the service status page for Outlook.com – published on Wednesday 11 November – said the service is now stable and accessible to the “majority of users” and that an investigation into the root cause of the problem continues.