Yesterday, an Azure Active Directory issue caused many users to log out of their Microsoft cloud services. The issue prevented them from authenticating.
According to the company,
Starting at approximately 19:15 UTC on 15 Mar, a subset of customers may have experienced issues authenticating into Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, Office and/or Dynamics, Xbox Live, and the Azure Portal. We have completed rollout of a fix to mitigate impact to Azure Active Directory and the Azure Portal. Additional impact to other Azure services/offerings that rely on the Azure Storage service may continue to see further impact. A subset of customers may experience 403 error notifications when attempting to make storage calls.
Along with Azure, many other services by the company were also affected. These include Teams, Office, Exchange Online, Yammer, and Xbox Live. According to a Tweet posted on Xbox’s official page, the platform was facing issues with Redeem a Code, Game Streaming, and Purchases.
However, Microsoft was relatively quick to roll out a fix.
We've identified the underlying cause of the problem and are taking steps to mitigate impact. We'll provide an updated ETA on resolution as soon as one is available. Additional information can be found at https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl or under MO244568 if available.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) March 15, 2021
The company announced,
We currently have a deployment in progress, in line with safe deployment practices, to mitigate residual impact to Azure Storage. As the deployment continues to the impacted regions, some customers may begin to see signs of recovery. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes or as events warrant.
Within two hours of the issue surfacing, the company rolled out the mitigation and disclosed that it is seeing a decrease in error rates.
