Microsoft confirmed a significant outage affecting its Microsoft 365 suite on March 3, 2025, linking the disruption to a critical failure in its authentication token system. While Microsoft assured users no data was compromised, the outage highlighted dependencies on centralized authentication systems without fallback protocols. We've detected a potential authentication token issue that may be contributing to impact, and we're further examining this pathway to determine our next troubleshooting steps. We're investigating an issue impacting Microsoft Teams-provisioned auto attendants and call queues. Microsoft identified the root cause as a breakdown in the silent token refresh mechanism, a core component of its identity management framework. Cyber Security News is a Dedicated News Platform For Cyber News, Cyber Attack News, Hacking News & Vulnerability Analysis. We've identified a recent change that inadvertently caused impact to auto attendant and call queues. Authentication tokens, which validate user identities without requiring repeated logins, failed to renew automatically due to unresponsive regional servers. Microsoft’s Incident MO1022159 noted the problem originated in Canada, where routing issues with local ISPs like Rogers exacerbated the outage. For more details, please see TM1022107 in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Services resumed fully by 2:20 AM, but the outage underscores cloud infrastructure’s vulnerability to authentication bottlenecks. The incident, which impacted users across Canada and parts of the U.S. for nearly three hours, prevented access to Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive. Additional information can be found in the admin center under TM1022107. Administrators temporarily mitigated the issue by clearing cached tokens or restarting the Click-to-Run service—a stopgap solution discussed in Reddit threads. Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. This triggered a large amount of authentication errors, locking users out of cloud-based applications.
This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Tue, 04 Mar 2025 06:55:03 +0000