top of page

Office365 multi-factor authentication outage - resolved



Yesterday's global outage appears to be resolved

Good news if you or your business uses the Microsoft Office365 cloud services - after almost a whole day of being unable to log into your account, it does appear that the services are now working once again.

Microsoft still have a warning up on their status website - status.office.com - but it says that they've noticed an improvement in the number of people now being able to log back into their Office365 accounts.

Yesterday's issue did not affect users who don't have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled on their accounts. It only affected those whom have it enabled.

Normally, one of the options listed, needed to be actioned to gain access to Office365 cloud services, such as Outlook email, OneDrive Personal, OneDrive for Business and so on:

- answer a phone call to prove its said user accessing the account

- type in a code from a text message

- type in a code from the Microsoft authentication app

- approve or deny your sign-in request using the Microsoft authentication app

If non of the above has been completed, you won't be signed into your account until one of the above have been actioned.

We have been running some tests of our own and have been able to log into accounts which have multi-factor authentication enabled - this backs up what Microsoft say on its status website.

Here's what Microsoft's status page and administration portal said yesterday about the incident:

Current status: We're continuing to see increased success with MFA requests and are actively investigating the underlying source of the issue.

The latest updates reads for better news, too:

"We've conducted extensive monitoring over the last 12 hours and have not observed an increase in failed authentication requests."

The site also sates that they are going to continue to keep this incident active and will monitor the situation to find the root cause of the issue and resolve it.

This global outage started yesterday - Monday, November 19, 2018, at 4:39 AM UTC and is still active to date - Tuesday, November 20, 2018, at 11:00 PM UTC.

Microsoft have said the reason why this issue came about was due to: "update to the MFA service introduced a coding issue that prevented users from being able to sign in...".

For more tech news and reviews, follow us on Twitter @Hart_Pro_Tweets #HartleyProductions and Like us on Facebook and Instagram @HartleyProductionsOfficial. As always, keep checking back on hartleyproductions.uk for more.

4 views

Comments


bottom of page