- MO1221364 Microsoft 365 outages have now been fixed
- Microsoft says parts of its North American infrastructure were to blame
- Hours of rebalancing and refining preceded a fix, but it seems to have worked
A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted access to core M365 services for enterprise customers, as email inboxes, files, meetings and other cloud-based tools were all restricted.
“We are investigating a potential issue affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender, and Microsoft Purview,” the company wrote in an X post that identified the issue as MO1221364 in the admin center.
Regular X updates during the outage confirm that a fix was issued about 12 hours later, bringing the affected services back online and we now know what the problem was.
M365 crashes are now fixed
The company blamed “part of the service infrastructure in North America” for “not processing traffic as expected.” While the exact cause was not fully disclosed, the identification came about an hour after Microsoft first shared reports of the outage.
“Any user served through an affected section of the service infrastructure in the North America region may be intermittently affected,” the status read.
Affected users saw the error message “451 4.3.2 temporary server problem”.
Some of the remedial steps Microsoft took between identifying the problem and fixing it were to “rebalance traffic across all affected infrastructure”, refine this to “optimize performance” and restore services to a “healthy state”. The problem has since been completely resolved.
Down detector data roughly confirms this, showing a spike at the time of identification. Two-thirds of the issues were related to Exchange access, with some users reporting problems with server connections and logins. A separate spike correlates with the fix – it’s unclear if this is related to changes made to issue the fix, or if the second spike is indicative of another bug.
At the time of writing, Microsoft’s status page shows no further signs of problems.
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