Several Microsoft services that were knocked offline owing to a widespread authentication issue have been restored, company sources revealed. As things stand now, Skype and Xbox Live along with Outlook and Hotmail are reported to be accessible since 1600 PT.
Unfortunately, OneDrive continues to be off the mark though Microsoft has assured they are working on the issue and hope things to be back to normal at the earliest. Azure has been rather stable though some users did mention they have had trouble logging into the service using their Microsoft account credentials.
Worth mentioning, all of the above can well be considered to be a re-run of a similar issue that first came to haunt Microsoft users about two weeks back. This time, those in the UK and the coastal regions in the US reported not getting access to their Outlook accounts.
Similarly, those in West Europe, as well as cities along the US coast, again were having issues logging into their OneDrive accounts. Skype users in Brazil and Western Europe too said they were unable to send and receive messages while Xbox Online gamers in Brazil, Western Europe, US, UK said they were not able to log into their accounts.
Microsoft however did not reveal the exact cause of the outage but stated the latest incident to be a remnant of the earlier authentication issue reported around two weeks back. Engineers though revealed they have zeroed in on a deployment task installed recently to be causing the issue and have already rolled back the same to reinstate normalcy.
Microsoft also said they are doing a thorough run of the system logs to ensure anything of this sort does not emerge again.
Interestingly, it has been weeks since the Amazon Web Services too suffered a massive outage though the problem there was later identified to an erroneous response made to a system query. Microsoft’s issue is a bit different though both have the same fallout from the user’s perspective – that of remaining shut off from using the services.
