This morning as New Zealand is under lockdown we heard thousands of Kiwis have been impacted by an apparent Microsoft 365 outage.

Gorilla Technology Chief Executive Paul Spain weighed in on the outage, “After investigation our team soon recognised this was limited to just a portion of the population. Some people were able to work around the issue by tethering to their mobile device and therefore bypassing their primary internet connection. Ultimately it became clear the issue was primarily impacting customers of Vodafone New Zealand.”

A telling fact was that Vodafone were alerting the issue was fixed prior to Microsoft issuing their own confirmation.

On this occasion it is likely a routing change by Vodafone NZ or another Internet provider impacted the flow of data between some networks in New Zealand and the Microsoft data centres in Australia. This routing issue appears to have been rectified and therefore most Microsoft services are operating normally again.

Microsoft have now also issued the following statement to New Zealand users via their Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard:

Initial reports indicated that users were unable to access Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint Online, though additional services may have also been impacted.

Final status: We’ve determined that our service was operating as expected; however, we’ve confirmed that a third-party ISP introduced a change that caused access to our Microsoft 365 services to be impacted. The third-party ISP corrected the issue and we’ve confirmed that impact has been resolved.