Microsoft Office 365 portal suffers another wobble

IT administrators express their frustration as they struggle to log in for a second business day running

Microsoft's Office 365 portal is encountering issues for a second consecutive working day, causing IT administrators across Europe to vent their dismay on Twitter.

The admin portal for Microsoft's cloud productivity suite experienced a wobble on Friday, but later in the day Microsoft said it had fixed the issue.

But the software giant admitted in another tweet at 9.19am today that it was looking into reports of further problems.

In response to the tweet, users in multiple European countries, including the UK, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Sweden and Lithuania, confirmed that they had experienced difficulties logging in this morning. Others complained that it was working, but was very slow.

One miffed user said: "It's similar to what was encountered Friday last week. People start asking: Is O365 Enterprise Ready?"

Another tweeted: "Same issue as Friday. Affecting user and admin accounts. Annoying that the service health portal on Friday said this was a false alert."

Pete Banham, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast, argued that admin portal availability is "critical" to ensuring secure management of Office 365 services.

"This is how organisations troubleshoot day-to-day issues, secure user accounts, and conduct data discovery for compliance," he said.

"With each outage or service issue, more and more organisations are understanding the risks of entrusting email and application data to a single cloud ecosystem."

A Microsoft representative told us the issue was "short lived" and was resolved this morning, stressing that a tweet was posted at 11.01am to confirm this.