Microsoft Outlook, Skype, OneDrive had Another Authentication Issue Preventing Logins

Things haven’t been going well for users of Microsoft’s online services like Outlook, Skype, and OneDrive. About two weeks ago there was an authentication issue that prevented people who use those services from logging in. On March 21, those authentication issues hit again.

The first sign that users were unable to log into their Microsoft services came when reports from users began to hit Twitter. Reports indicated that Office 365 accounts were still working, which I can confirm because I have a corporate Office 365 account and it worked without issues yesterday.

ZDNet reports that the issue began at about 1:30 p.m. ET. During the outage the Skype Heartbeat site that keeps an eye on what’s going on with Skype noted that users might be having issues logging into accounts. The message seen during signin stated, “We are actively investigating problem, preventing users from signing-in and sending Skype-to-Skype messages! We’ll let you know as soon, as issues are resolved.”

Xbox Live also had its own issues with signing in and managing account content. When this same type of outage happened two weeks ago, Microsoft offered no comments on what might be causing the outage. By 3:25 p.m. ET Microsoft had stated that it was deploying a fix for the issue and by 3:30 pm ET some users were stating they were able to log into some Microsoft services. Again, Microsoft has offered no official comment on what happened.