Microsoft WAN issues hit M365, GitHub and Azure access

Microsoft users experienced widespread issues when trying to access M365, Azure, GitHub and other online services, with the vendor pointing to a “networking configuration issue" as the root cause.

The issues began to appear at just after 6pm AEDT (7am UTC). Microsoft claimed to have restored network connectivity at 9.35am UTC.

A status advisory said that Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, PowerBI, Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Microsoft Graph were either degraded or inaccessible during the two-and-a-half hour duration.

A separate advisory confirmed issues with Azure Networking, which caused problems for users trying to access a broad set of Azure services.

Another status advisory for GitHub pointed to “degraded performance” across multiple tools and services, including Actions, Codespaces, API Requests and Copilot.

Microsoft said it had identified what it believed to be the root cause.

"Customers may experience issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources in multiple regions, as well as other Microsoft services," the vendor said.

"We've determined the network connectivity issue is occurring with devices across the Microsoft wide area network (WAN).

"This impacts connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centres, as well as ExpressRoute connections.

"The issue is causing impact in waves, peaking approximately every 30 minutes."

Microsoft said that it had identified "a recent WAN update as the likely underlying cause, and have taken steps to roll back this update."

"Networking telemetry shows recovery from 09:00 UTC onwards across all regions and services, with the final networking equipment recovering at 09:35 UTC," the vendor said.

"Most impacted Microsoft services automatically recovered once network connectivity was restored, and we worked to recover the remaining impacted services."

The impact of the outage is global, with users in Oceania, Asia Pacific and further afield reporting problems.

iTnews' own tests showed long load times for Exchange Online and Teams, though apps did eventually load and function.