Microsoft's Lync Instant Messaging Service Suffers Outage, Engineers Still Working On Fix

Microsoft’s Lync instant messaging service, part of the Microsoft Office 365 package, suffered an outage Monday morning and was still inaccessible for some users as of noon Pacific time.

In an update on the situation distributed by Microsoft, which was viewed by CRN, its engineers reported that part of the network infrastructure that routes traffic had become degraded.

’ Engineers have shifted traffic to alternate capacity and are now checking service health. Affected customers should now be experiencing partial service restoration, with the ability to sign in being restored incrementally. Customers may continue to experience reduced functionality as the service recovers,’ the Microsoft update reads.

Lync handles instant messaging, Voice over IP and has video conferencing capabilities.

Microsoft reports the outage as having started at noon UTC, which is 7 am ET.

CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if we hear back.

One Microsoft partner told CRN the vendor hasn't provided any insight into when the issue will be fixed.

"For a company that has made cloud a strategic initiative, and which develops software as a core business, they’ve done a poor job of tending to a lot of the basic details that both customers and partners need," said the partner, who requested anonymity.

Around 9 a.m. Pacific time, some users began reporting on Twitter that they were having problems using the service.

Microsoft Lync Online appears to be down this morning.

is still down now in NJ/NYC & across the nation from what I can see on forums.

Customers affected by the outage were knocked off the Lync Online Service and then unable to sign back in.

Microsoft has not yet confirmed the scope of the outage and whether it is affecting users around the world. The Microsoft update only states: ’Customers experiencing this issue may see up to 100% of their users affected.’