Where are we now, Microsoft 362.5? Europe reports outages

Some Microsoft 365 users in Western Europe earlier today were reporting service problems today, though those in the UK seem to have avoided many of the issues.

A scan of comments from users on Reddit show a range of complaints from error messages while trying to open Outlook to outages to LinkedIn being down. Users in Sweden, Austria, Germany, and other countries were reporting in.

Microsoft earlier in the day said the problem was coming from a datacenter in Germany "not performing at optimal performance thresholds." The company added that it reduced the workload on the infrastructure in question and two hours later reported that the problem was fixed.

"The mitigations have helped resolve the underlying issue and our telemetry has confirmed that the impact to accessing files is now resolved," Redmond said on Twitter.

Both Downdetector and Allestorungen, Europe's answer to Downdetector, showed spikes of complaints related to Teams earlier today.

Until then, the outage was causing headaches in Europe. One user in Belgium wrote that while OneDrive was working well, Teams was loading slowly. Another said they were "pretty sure" some networks in Austria were down and a third said they were having problems loading accounts on Outlook.

Many UK users said they weren't seeing any problems, with one saying they were OK in Britain but that "our German team admin is saying they've no incoming or outgoing emails at the moment." One snarky UK user suggested that maybe it was an upside of Brexit.

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Still, while it appears the bulk of problems were on the continent, the UK wasn't totally without problems.

"Some of our RDS [Remote Desktop Service] users having problems with Outlook showing 'Need Password' and then when they click on that it shows 'Error - Something went wrong [1001],'" one user wrote. "Also users getting the same 1001 error when trying to load Excel sheets from SharePoint."

The whole situation made one user admit that they were "feeling a lot better about having on-site resources and datacenter right now."

The outage in Europe today comes a week after Microsoft saw wide-ranging outages of Microsoft 365 services and the Azure Cloud portal. For several days the IT giant gave updates on steps to address the issues but said little about a threat group calling itself Anonymous Sudan, which claimed that it was responsible for causing the outages.

However, Microsoft on June 16 admitted that the outages were caused by distributed denial-of-services (DDoS) attacks by a group that the company is tracking as Storm-1359, though didn't identify that group as Anonymous Sudan.

"These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools," Microsoft wrote in a post, adding that "this recent DDoS activity targeted layer 7 rather than layer 3 or 4."

The company added that its engineers "hardened layer 7 protections including tuning Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) to better protect customers from the impact of similar DDoS attacks." ®