Microsoft 365 Had an MFA Outage Today

It wasn’t just you: Microsoft had issues with its multi-factor authentication (MFA) today, Monday, January 13.

Bleeping Computer first reported the issue. According to the outlet, the outage prevented users from accessing Microsoft 365 Office apps. Other users reported issues with MFA registration and reset.

In an incident alert, Microsoft shared the following: “Users may be unable to access some Microsoft 365 Apps when authenticating with MFA…We’re re-directing traffic to alternate healthy infrastructure while we continue to investigate the root cause of impact.”

In addition, the company clarified that this situation only affected users who rely on MFA for authentication in Microsoft 365 Office apps.

This is not the first Microsoft 365 outage in recent memory. In December, there was an issue that triggered “Product Deactivated” errors for users of Microsoft 365 Office apps. Before that, an outage blocked users from Office web apps and the admin center. Then, back in November, there was a Microsoft 365 outage that affected the entire world, and blocked service to a number of platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Purview, Copilot, and Outlook Web and Desktop.

The good news is, this current outage seems to be resolved. As of 5:51 a.m. ET, Microsoft shared the good news, posting the following to the admin center: “We’ve identified that a section of infrastructure responsible for MFA operations unexpectedly became unresponsive…We’ve completed an extended period of monitoring in which the service health has remained stable and are declaring this incident as resolved. Impact was specific to users are authenticating to our M365 Apps using MFA via infrastructure in Western Europe.”