Microsoft is currently probing a case where Microsoft 365 Online users couldn't access the web apps and pages. The partial outage hit the platform on Thursday, April 20.
Microsoft 365 Outage Blocks Access to Web Apps
According to Bleeping Computer, several reports say that some users are complaining that they cannot access Microsoft 365 apps after they sign in to their accounts.
"Users may be intermittently unable to view or access web apps in Microsoft 365. We're reviewing service monitoring telemetry to isolate the root cause and develop a remediation plan," the admin center incident report reads.
The temporary shutdown occurred in the morning as the Redmond giant noticed some errors in the caching infrastructure. Following the findings, the company advised that users might be barred from viewing the apps in Microsoft 365.
Some products that remain inaccessible are Microsoft 365 suite, Yammer Enterprise, Microsoft Teams, Planner, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online.
Microsoft Engineers Narrowed Down Outage Cause
In another report by The Register, Microsoft engineers have found out that the culprit behind the unexpected outage was the "unusually high number of timeout exceptions within our caching and our Azure Active Directory (ADD) infrastructure."
The software maker adds that the caching infrastructure did not attain its usual performance threshold and stooped down to a lower level. This allows the cache to be bypassed, thus pushing calls to obtain user licensing information.
In addition, this also results in high resource utilization, as Microsoft wrote in its advisory to the public.
We're investigating high CPU utilization on the components which process back-end navigation feature APIs. Further details are under MO544165 in the admin center. As the admin center currently does not appear within the Waffle, use https://t.co/EdTvCQNMih to access the service.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) April 20, 2023
How to Access the Microsoft 365 Apps If it's Not Working on Your End
One Redditor said that he couldn't disable the Microsoft 365 apps for Business. When he refreshed it, the access returned to normal.
The tech firm advised the users to wait for 10 minutes before they refresh the page. If there are no good signs that the apps are viewable, that's the time that they need to contact the IT department for assistance.
Before the April outage, Microsoft 365 services suffered from outages in January. The company uncovered that it was caused by issues in the routers located in WAN (Wide Area Network).
The users said they couldn't get through Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, OneDrive, Admin Center, and Microsoft Graph at that time.
You can visit the Microsoft 365 admin center through this link once the company finds the fix to the outage.
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