Office 365 and Outlook.com outage hits North American users

Microsoft is blaming a networking error for a service disruption to its cloud services hosted in North America.

The company’s Office 365 online software suite and Outlook.com cloud email services are both understood to be down, with some users reporting issues accessing its Skydrive storage offering too.

The problems, which Microsoft claims are causing partial availability for some users, affect the Access Control 2.0 (West US), Compute (East US), Compute (North Central US) and Compute (West) services.

While Asia Pacific and Europe are unaffected, the timing of the outage is inconvenient for many, as it began just as the East Coast of the US began work.

On its Azure service dashboard, Microsoft said: “We are troubleshooting this networking issue, and capturing all the data that will allow us to resolve it. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes our customers.”

Despite this, many users have taken to Twitter to vent their frustration at the downtime.

The outage comes just three days after the official launch of Microsoft’s Office 2013 suite and Office 365 Home Premium, and 48 hours after the company announced an SMB-focused Office 365 offering.

Jane McCallion is ITPro's Managing Editor, specializing in data centers and enterprise IT infrastructure. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.