Microsoft warns of cloud login outage

Microsoft has revealed that some users of its Office 365 and Azure clouds may have been unable to access the services since late Monday afternoon, Australian time.

The outage only impacts users who choose to sign in using multi-factor authentication and has hit the company's Europe, Asia-Pacific and Americas regions. Australia is in the Asia-Pacific region.

Microsoft's status pages for Azure and Office 365  explain that users may experience difficulties signing in to if multi-factor authentication (MFA) is required by policy.

Microsoft said its people have installed a "hotfix" for Azure and that it "eliminated a connection between Azure Identity Multi-Factor Authentication Service and a backend Service. The deployment of this hotfix took time to propagate across the impacted regions, primarily Europe and Asia-Pacific."

The fix appears to have worked: Microsoft reports "a reduction in user authentication errors as a result". But the incident isn't over: Microsoft says "As a consequence of this fix, Engineers have determined that a subset of customers might not be receiving prompts (SMS, Call or Push (via the app))."

Repairs to Office 365 appear to be more advanced as Microsoft reports that it has "conducted restarts across all of the infrastructure responsible for MFA connectivity and many users are reporting that they can successfully sign in using MFA."

But Microsoft doesn't know what went wrong with Office 365 and said it "... will keep this incident active until we have confidence that the actions we have taken will provide continued relief."

Microsoft has not provided a timeframe for the problems' resolution, but is posting regular updates about the incidents.

iTnews will update this story as the situation develops.