Microsoft 365 and Power BI Services Interrupted Worldwide
- By Kurt Mackie
- January 25, 2023
Some Microsoft customers experienced service delays or timeouts on Tuesday, which occurred worldwide.
The service interruption lasted about two hours and 40 minutes, according to a Jan. 25 "Azure Status History" page entry. Microsoft's public Azure customers using services such as Microsoft 365 and Power BI were affected. The service problems occurred "between 07:05 UTC and 09:45 UTC on 25 January 2023," Microsoft stated.
That time period translates to a near three-hour period starting at 11:05 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday Jan. 24.
Microsoft is attributing the service delays to an undescribed change made by its personnel to the Microsoft Wide Area Network. The glitch affected client connections to Azure services. It also affected service connectivity between regions, "as well as ExpressRoute connections." Azure ExpressRoute is Microsoft's network with hosting partners to provide high-bandwidth private Internet connections.
Microsoft fixed the connection problem, and most services came back on line thereafter.
"Most impacted Microsoft services automatically recovered once network connectivity was restored, and we worked to recover the remaining impacted services," Microsoft explained.
Microsoft is planning to release a "preliminary Post Incident Review" report in three days that will describe the "initial root cause" of the incident. It plans to issue a final Post Incident Review report "14 days later" that will offer a "deep dive" description.
Microsoft's services go down all of the time. This particular incident was widely reported. The only area in the world that was not affected was China, according to a Reuters' report.
Microsoft does offer service-level agreements (SLAs) for its various services. The SLAs typically assure 99.95 percent or 99.99 percent uptimes. A service credit might be permitted if that uptime percentage drops. However, the SLAs come with fine print exceptions. For instance, the SLA won't apply for failures in a "single Microsoft Datacenter location" when organizations are specifically dependent on that location.
Microsoft's SLA terms are rather involved and they can get changed. The latest SLA documents can be downloaded at this page.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.