Microsoft 365 experienced a notable outage, with reports spiking around 8:00 pm BST, causing disruptions for users trying to access Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft services. Seven out of ten complaints were related to Outlook, while around 18% were attributed to SharePoint, one of the affected services. According to reports, the outage was caused by a simple TLS error, which occurred due to a recent certificate update. Specifically, the sharepoint.de German TLS certificate was mistakenly added to the main sharepoint.com domain, causing global issues for users.
Fortunately, Microsoft quickly identified the problem and issued a fix within 10 minutes of detecting the error. The company attributed the outage to the certificate update mistake. Reports of the outage continued until beyond 10:00 pm BST before subsiding. However, at around 8:00 am BST the following day, reports started to rise again, though it remains unclear whether this was related to the previous hiccup or a new issue.
This is not the first time Microsoft has faced service disruptions due to simple errors. In a previous incident, Azure DevOps experienced a 10-hour outage in parts of Brazil after a typo resulted in the accidental deletion of the Azure SQL Server instead of the intended individual Azure SQL Database. Such incidents underscore the importance of maintaining suitable backups and highlight the fragility of online services in the face of technical errors and cyberattacks.
