Microsoft Azure’s multifactor authentication system was down for an extended period of time Sunday evening into Monday morning, preventing users at companies that require that step from logging into their Office 365 accounts.
The outage was first noted Sunday evening at the Microsoft Azure status blog and blamed on a “hotfix” that “eliminated a connection between Azure Identity Multi-Factor Authentication Service and a backend Service,” according to Microsoft. The Office 365 status page also warns users that they’ll probably have trouble logging into their accounts if their company requires multifactor authentication, which generally involves two steps to enter a known password as well as a unique code delivered to one’s phone.
Multifactor authentication is one of those things you probably should be using if you’re not already, and there’s nothing more secure than a service no one can log into, but this isn’t what Microsoft and its customers had in mind. The company expects to issue an update on the progress of the fix within the hour, and we’ll update this post if we learn more about the outage.
