UPDATED 23:32 EDT / MARCH 21 2017

CLOUD

Microsoft outage affects Xbox Live, Outlook.com, Skype, OneDrive and Windows Store users

Microsoft account holders across the range of the tech giant’s services, including Xbox Live, Outlook.com, Skype, OneDrive, and Microsoft’s Windows Store, suffered an outage Tuesday that prevented them from signing into accounts for nearly two hours.

The outage, the second in March, not only resulted in users being unable to log into services such as Office 365 but also crippled online multiplayer games on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and One consoles.

Microsoft Corp. confirmed the outage on the Xbox Live support site, writing that “our engineers and developers are actively continuing to work to resolve the issue causing some members to have problems finding previously purchased content or purchasing new content,” and that users should “stay tuned, and thanks for your patience.”

In a similar thread on the Office 365 support site, the company said that “users may be intermittently unable to sign in to the service,” with a later update noting, “We’ve completed deployment of the fix and confirmed that service is restored. Users may need to exit all browsers and/or refresh the page in order to successfully sign in.”

It’s not clear how widespread the outage was, although The Register noted that U.K. and U.S. coastal cities were particularly hit hard, as well as OneDrive customers in Western Europe.

Most services are now seemingly back online, but OneDrive account users are still experiencing issues. “We’ve determined that the previously resolved issue had some residual impact to the service configuration for OneDrive,” Microsoft said. “We’re performing an analysis of the affected systems to determine what further steps are needed for full recovery.”

Perhaps related, Microsoft Azure customers also experienced issues. Azure’s status page noted that “a subset of customers may have experienced increased latency or network timeouts while attempting to access Azure resources with traffic passing through the East Coast.” But the company added, “Engineers have identified the preliminary root cause as infrastructure impacted by a facilities issue in a 3rd party regional routing site located in South East U.S.”

Photo: Grj23/Wikimedia Commons

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