Microsoft services hit by authentication problem

A swathe of Microsoft services have been hit by an authentication problem, with the company confirming problems with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, LinkedIn, and other services that leverage Azure Active Directory (AAD) affected.

A preliminary analysis by the company has attributed the issue to a “portion of third-party managed network infrastructure that facilitates authentication requests”.

“We've moved services to an alternate network provider and performed numerous targeted service restarts,” an update from Microsoft said.

“Our telemetry indicates that service availability has improved significantly and most authentication requests are succeeding; however, we still are observing residual impact to some services. We're working to develop a remediation strategy for all remaining impact.”

The company said that customers that have their authorisation cached are not affected, and that around 50 per cent of new authentications are succeeding.

“Starting at 21:00 UTC on 29 Jan 2019, customers may experience issues accessing Microsoft Cloud resources, as well as intermittent authentication issues across multiple Azure services,” an Azure status message said.

“Engineers have identified an issue with Level 3 as an internal network provider. Steps have been taken to fail over to an alternative DNS provider which has partially mitigated impact. Engineers continue to pursue other mitigation paths to ensure full recovery.”

Microsoft also confirmed that US government cloud resources are affected by the issue.