This article is more than 1 year old

Office 365 celebrates National Beer Day by popping out for a pint

UK users waiting for emails to download ponder early start to weekend

Office 365 is suffering a stuttering start to the weekend with UK users complaining this morning that the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.

The first hint of a problem came at 1004, UK time, with users complaining about connectivity issues with Office 365 and Azure.

In the absence of a response from Microsoft's support drones, other than the odd "We have no matching incidents", users began doing some sleuthing of their own, and have been claiming to find what appear to be some network configuration problems causing packet loss.

The discovery would certainly explain why the service has slowed.

By 1210, the Office 365 status account on Twitter agreed that, yes, something bad had happened with UK connectivity and engineers were looking into the problem.

Both service status pages for Office 365, however, are resolutely ignoring the issues, with one insisting that "We're all good", along with a big green tick against Outlook (something UK users would likely contest).

The other only reports a vaguely hilarious incompatibility issue between the Office portal and Microsoft's own browser, Edge, but makes no mention of the performance issues blighting Blighty.

Business continuity firm Mimecast's resident resilience expert, Pete Banham, told The Register: "Multiple European organisations were struck by Office 365 disruption today as users reported that email services were slow or non-responsive. Operational dependency on the Microsoft environment creates business risks that need be addressed."

To be fair to Microsoft, operational dependency on any single environment will result in a single point of failure, which is never a good thing. That knowledge is, however, cold comfort to users pondering an early pint while they wait for their emails to download.

El Reg has contacted Microsoft to find out what is going on and will update with any response. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like