Microsoft Hit With Authentication Issue, Many Users Were Locked Out of Accounts

If you are trying to login to your Microsoft account today and are being told your password is incorrect, it can’t find your account, or your two-factor authentication has failed, you are not alone. Starting early this morning, both Paul and I were not able to login to a few different Microsoft accounts.

For Paul, he cannot access his email and I cannot login to Skype; this issue appears to be widespread as well as there are many on Twitter saying they have the same issue. Others are reporting that they unable to access OneDrive as well.

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This type of outage is quite serious as it locks users out of their content and with Microsoft pushing that you should use all of their services to move your life to the cloud, this is the type of outage that tarnishes that message. One user chose to reset their phone this morning and is now unable to restore a backup.

I have pinged Microsoft to see if they have any further information about this issue, as of the timing of this post, their online dashboards are all green; helpful.

[Update] As of about 9:00 A.M ET, services are back online.

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Conversation 21 comments

  • Lewk

    Premium Member
    07 March, 2017 - 8:37 am

    <p>I'm just thankful it's 11:30pm at night for me and I'm going to bed. Fingers-crossed it's fixed by the time I wake up tomorrow.</p>

  • Narg

    07 March, 2017 - 8:41 am

    <p>Gonna be a fun day…&nbsp; :(</p>

  • PStansberry78

    07 March, 2017 - 8:49 am

    <p>Neat.&nbsp; Makes me very nervous…&nbsp; time to update that local backup of everything I have in OneDrive when this comes back up I suppose.&nbsp; :-/</p>

  • vaticanuk

    07 March, 2017 - 8:51 am

    <p>xbox live dashboard shows the core services being down:</p><p><br></p><p>Affected services:</p><ul><li>Signing into Xbox Live,Sign In</li></ul><p>Latest update:</p><p>We are aware that some members may be having problems signing in to Xbox Live. We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we will be sure to provide you with frequent updates.</p>

  • jrswarr

    Premium Member
    07 March, 2017 - 8:52 am

    <p>I am cannot connect to OneDrive. Plus several connected services are saying my MS account needs attention – in particular Windows Insider.</p>

  • variableq

    07 March, 2017 - 9:02 am

    <p>Same for me, no email, one drive, skype</p>

  • KeithDud

    07 March, 2017 - 9:21 am

    <p>Outlook down for about an hour in Bristol, UK but back up now</p>

  • jim.mcintosh

    07 March, 2017 - 9:27 am

    <p>I first noticed this when I got the yellow ! saying Office 365&nbsp;couldn't connect and that I needed to log-in.&nbsp; I went off to do just that only to be told that my account doesn't exist.&nbsp; Glad that, like some, I haven't abandoned Crash Plan and have both local and Their cloud back-up as well.</p>

  • Vuppe

    07 March, 2017 - 9:41 am

    <p>Yeah, I had some trouble logging in to email this morning. Seemed to work after a few attempts. Good to know it wasn't just me! </p>

  • Ugur

    07 March, 2017 - 9:44 am

    <p>I hope that gives them incentive to look into all their accounts stuff and improve it.</p><p>For the past few months it randomly logs me out of Skype on my mobile devices by itself quite often which is mega annoying and had NEVER happened before MS bought Skype in all those years i already used it before.</p>

  • xapache

    07 March, 2017 - 10:52 am

    <p>Strangely, I am still not able to login to Skype Preview but Skype desktop no problems.</p>

  • PeteB

    07 March, 2017 - 11:58 am

    <p>And this is why I'll stick to Local account on Windows, no matter how much MS wants everyone to have a cloud crap account, and tries to obfuscate the local option in Windows setup. </p>

    • stevek

      07 March, 2017 - 2:33 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#88930">In reply to PeteB:</a></em></blockquote><p>A MS account would be cached on your PC if you used it to log in…so if you were using one…and your internet was out; heck you could unplug it from your router etc…You'd still be able to log into it.</p><p><br></p><p>There may be reasons to not use a cloud account; but this is not one of them.</p>

      • PeteB

        07 March, 2017 - 3:14 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#88961">In reply to stevek:</a></em></blockquote><p>…sure, until there's a problem with the cached account. Been through that too many times with cached domain accounts when a server was unavailable.</p><p>With a local account I never have to worry about it. MSA has never added any value anyway, the sync between devices is broken and inconsistent in my experience.</p>

  • mike2k

    07 March, 2017 - 2:45 pm

    <p>We will never hear why this happened or get an apology. MS always being hush hush but this was a big deal</p>

  • Winner

    07 March, 2017 - 3:33 pm

    <p>I've always wondered why people are so eager to rely on the cloud and internet services without local backup.</p>

    • Darmok N Jalad

      07 March, 2017 - 5:21 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#88981">In reply to Winner:</a></em></blockquote><p>That's why I use the cloud, but also store all critical content locally. I'm not a fan of letting the OS "manage" my local storage. The only items I don't have local copies of are things I don't consider critical if they are lost forever.</p><p>On the bright side, we've yet to see a mass loss of data, just an access outage. To me, if the cloud or internet goes down severely, what else really bad happened? Will our digital content even matter at that point, or do we have much bigger life problems?</p>

  • Igor Engelen

    07 March, 2017 - 4:03 pm

    <p>Did they make a typo somewhere like Amazon a couple of days ago? ?</p><p>Seriously though, let's just hope that was no cover up story. People would start thinking someone is targeting big players.</p><p>No matter what the real reason is, it's bad publicity for sure.</p>

  • lordbaal1

    07 March, 2017 - 9:45 pm

    <p>everything goes down from time to time. Nothing have a 100% uptime.</p>

    • hardhatkatt

      08 March, 2017 - 8:48 am

      <p><em>Which is why they build redundancy into networks. This isnt ameture hour here were not talking about a single server that crashed. We talking about a issue that affected multiple servers globally. How often has the entire internet gone down? Never, So, lets revisit you commentt and try again. </em><a href="#89066"><em>In reply to lordbaal1:</em></a></p>

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