Microsoft Office 365 Outage Impacts European Users
Some users who were trying to login to Office 365 yesterday were unable to do so, due to an outage originating inside of the Microsoft Azure cloud service.
The outage was confined to Western Europe, with organizations in the UK feeling the brunt of the downtime. According to the Azure blog, an Active Directory configuration error is the root cause of the outage.
Azure Active Directory is the Culprit
Since users were unable to login to Office 365, many end users were unable to access emails, documents and other types of media commonly hosted on Microsoft cloud. According some reports, users were intermittently unable to login for a span of 4 hours on Thursday morning.
Many users took their frustrations to social media, such as @SharepointAlex who wrote:
“Love how the @Office365 service status page is only accesible after logging in….but what if you can’t login! #fail #Office365”
A report by Computing.co.uk has the headline: Further Office 365 and Azure outages ‘could have a detrimental impact on the running of the country.’
This speculation could be true, considering many government entities have moved their workloads into the cloud. If users are unable to authenticate using Azure AD, how can users access critical information such as email, Office documents and more?
High Profile Cloud Outages Becoming Worrisome
Technical analysts have used the recent high profile outages and slowdowns that have impacted cloud services to pitch a diversified approach to cloud services.
Experts warn that when you put all of your eggs in one basket, you risk one thing going wrong that could bring down your entire enterprise.
Using a diversified IaaS approach when deploying enterprise apps should be part of your cloud strategy. Its unrealistic to believe that there will never be downtime.
However, when your organization has a plan, your business can mitigate the risks associated with cloud service provider downtime which increases the likelihood that your business will walk away from a cloud outage unscathed.
