M365 Admin Center Outage - February 10
Microsoft 365 users across North America are reporting widespread issues accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center today. The outage is affecting admin portal functionality, preventing IT administrators from managing users, raising support tickets, and accessing service health dashboards.
What's Affected
| Service | Status | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| M365 Admin Center | Degraded | Cannot access admin portal |
| Support Tickets | Down | Unable to raise new tickets |
| Service Health Dashboard | Intermittent | Status pages loading inconsistently |
| User Management | Degraded | Admin operations timing out |
DownDetector reports surged starting in the early morning hours, with thousands of reports concentrated in the eastern United States and Canada. Microsoft has acknowledged the issue and is investigating.
Microsoft Status Update: "We're investigating an issue affecting access to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Users may experience intermittent errors or degraded performance when accessing admin portal features."
Azure Infrastructure Outage - February 2-3
Just days earlier, Microsoft dealt with a significant Azure infrastructure outage that lasted over 10 hours, affecting Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure DevOps, and even GitHub Actions.
Timeline
- Feb 2, ~14:00 UTC — Reports begin surfacing of Azure VM connectivity issues
- Feb 2, ~15:30 UTC — Microsoft confirms "a subset of customers" affected
- Feb 2, ~18:00 UTC — Scope expands to include AKS, VMSS, and identity services
- Feb 3, ~00:30 UTC — Recovery begins as rollback is initiated
- Feb 3, ~04:00 UTC — Full recovery confirmed across all regions
Root Cause
Microsoft's preliminary analysis identified the root cause as a configuration change that inadvertently restricted storage access for compute resources. The change propagated across availability zones before automated safeguards could catch it.
Services Impacted
- Azure Virtual Machines — Failed to start or lost connectivity
- Virtual Machine Scale Sets — Auto-scaling operations failed
- Azure Kubernetes Service — Pod scheduling and node provisioning disrupted
- Azure DevOps — Pipeline runs failed or hung indefinitely
- GitHub Actions — Azure-hosted runners became unavailable
- Azure Identity/Entra — Authentication delays and failures
Pattern of Incidents
This marks the third significant Microsoft cloud outage in 2026, following a January incident that affected Teams and Exchange Online. The frequency has raised concerns among enterprise customers about multi-cloud resilience strategies.
Recommendations for IT Teams
- Monitor status pages proactively — Bookmark status.cloud.microsoft and configure alerts
- Implement multi-region deployments — Don't concentrate workloads in a single Azure region
- Have a communication plan — When admin portals go down, you need an alternate way to notify users
- Review SLA credits — If your services were affected, check your Azure SLA for potential credits
- Consider multi-cloud — For critical workloads, evaluate failover to AWS or GCP
Current Status
As of publication, the M365 admin center remains in a degraded state. Microsoft is actively working on remediation. We'll update this article as the situation develops.
For real-time updates, follow @MSABORDI or check the Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard.