Microsoft is currently investigating a significant outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services and the admin center. The disruption, reported by thousands of users on DownDetector, primarily impacts login attempts across the Microsoft 365 suite and Outlook services.

Affected Services Include:
– SharePoint Online (search and file access)
– Exchange Online (mailbox search and access)
– Microsoft 365 Admin Center

The company has classified this as a “critical service incident” due to its noticeable impact on users. This outage follows several recent service disruptions, including a December incident affecting Office web apps and a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) outage earlier this month that prevented access to Microsoft 365 Office applications.

Resolution Timeline:
– 13:44 EST: Microsoft reported partial resolution for some users
– 14:44 EST: Full mitigation confirmed

Root Cause:
Microsoft identified an erroneous configuration change that prevented access requests from completing normally. The issue was resolved by reverting the problematic change, with confirmation that service has been restored for all users.

The company clarified that the impact was primarily limited to administrators attempting to access the Microsoft 365 admin center, rather than affecting all end users of Microsoft 365 services.