Microsoft Azure and Office 365 users across Europe are suffering from login issues that are preventing them from accessing Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based infrastructure and business applications.

Computer Weekly understands users who tried to log in to the respective platforms were greeted with error messages saying their “domains” were either unrecognised or missing, making it impossible for them to access emails and launch virtual machines, for example.

According to user-generated outage data from the DownDetector website, Microsoft users across the UK and Europe appear to be affected most by the issues, which appear to have started around 9am on Friday 6 April.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has moved to assure users via its Azure and Office 365 support accounts on Twitter that engineers are getting to the root cause of the problem.

“Engineers are actively investigating customer reports of authentication issues when accessing the Azure Management Portal,” the company said in a post from the Azure Support account earlier today.

A follow-up post an hour or so later suggests the cause of the problem may lie with the Azure Active Directory service, as the firm said its engineers are now in the process of “validating” its health.

“Thanks for your patience today,” the company said in another post from the account. “Our engineers have been in touch to say they have applied mitigation steps and they are seeing signs of recovery.”

Read more about cloud outages A year on from Amazon’s S3 outage at its US-East-1 datacentre region, a power loss incident in the same place has caused a fresh round of service disruption for the cloud giant’s customers.

Microsoft-owned messaging service’s technical difficulties have now been resolved, after users flooded social networking sites with downtime reports.

On the Office 365 side, the company used its Twitter account to confirm that access to the online business productivity suite had been hindered by a “portal access issue”, which it now claims to have resolved.

“We’re monitoring the environment to validate that service is restored for all users,” a post from the Office 365 Twitter account said.

Computer Weekly contacted Microsoft for a comment on this story, and was directed to the Office 365 and Microsoft Azure status pages for further information.