Updated Microsoft cloud services have dived offline, taking down Outlook, Hotmail, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live.

The problems appear to have started on Tuesday morning Pacific Time, although systems could have started to wobble earlier: basically, people were and still are unable to log into their Microsoft-hosted services.

Outlook webmail users in the UK and US coastal cities are particularly hit hard, as well as OneDrive customers in Western Europe and the coastal strips of the US, Skypers in Brazil and Western Europe, and Xbox online gamers in the UK, US, Brazil, and Western Europe.

"Our engineers and developers are actively continuing to work to resolve the issue causing some members to have problems finding previously-purchased content or purchasing new content. Stay tuned, and thanks for your patience," the Xbox support forum reported at 1043 PT (1743 UTC).

"We are actively investigating problem, preventing users from signing-in and sending Skype-to-Skype messages! We'll let you know as soon, as issues are resolved," added the Skype team.

"Users may be intermittently unable to sign in to the service," the Outlook.com status page admitted. "As the issue is intermittent in nature, users may be able to reload the page or make another attempt successfully. We're analyzing system logs to determine the next troubleshooting steps."

The same also goes for Redmond's OneDrive cloud storage.

So far Azure seems much less affected, and some other Microsoft services appear to be coming back online in some sectors, although serious problems are also still being reported. Microsoft has told The Reg is should have a statement on the matter shortly. ®

Updated to add

At 1600 PT (2300 UTC), Skype, Outlook and Hotmail, and Xbox Live were back up and running, it seems. OneDrive is still knackered. "We've determined that the previously resolved issue had some residual impact to the service configuration for OneDrive. We're performing an analysis of the affected systems to determine what further steps are needed for full recovery," said Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Azure also had a wobble today: "Between 17:30 and 18:55 UTC on 21 Mar 2017, a subset of Azure customers may have experienced intermittent login failures while authenticating with their Microsoft accounts. Engineers identified a recent deployment task as the potential root cause. Engineers rolled back the recent deployment task to mitigate the issue."

So it sounds like someone broke something within Microsoft's account authentication systems, locking millions out of their services for several hours. Fun!