Microsoft 365 Outage Hits European Users as Office 2021 LTSC Support Ends

Global Secure Access Infrastructure Issue

Microsoft is experiencing an outage affecting Microsoft 365 services for some European customers, including users in Germany and the UK. The affected service is Global Secure Access (GSA), which customers rely on to access Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs. According to Microsoft's status page, a section of GSA infrastructure is performing below acceptable performance thresholds, affecting connectivity to Microsoft 365 services. The company says it is applying traffic and performance optimizations, and the system is now showing signs of recovery.

Admin Center Also Impacted

The outage has created an additional problem for IT administrators. Microsoft 365 administrators may be unable to access the admin center to get service health information, forcing the company to report status updates directly on its Service Health Status page. Visitors to the status page are greeted with the message "Great! No active issues," while a conflicting notice below reads: "We are having trouble getting info about your service incidents, advisories, and history right now."

Coincides with Office 2021 LTSC End of Support

The timing is notable because the outage coincides with the end of support for Office LTSC 2021, Microsoft's on-premises version of Office. Microsoft has been encouraging customers to migrate to Microsoft 365, though on-premises Office LTSC 2024 remains available as an alternative. While Office 2021 LTSC will not stop working, the end of support means customers will need to take action for compliance reasons.

Cloud Reliability Questions

For enterprises that have already moved to Microsoft 365, the incident raises questions about cloud reliability. Microsoft has demonstrated again that its cloud services are not quite as reliable as customers might hope or need, and an apology only goes so far where productivity losses are concerned. Companies weighing their options between on-premises Office and a cloud migration now have a fresh data point to consider.

Sources: Theregister