Anger grows as businesses go without full Microsoft email access for second day

Businesses using Microsoft’s email service have criticised the company’s response to a second day of outages, calling the help on offer “ridiculously vague”.

Office 365, the computing giant’s premium platform used by firms across the world, suffered an issue on Thursday morning making it impossible for some across Europe to access their accounts.

The issue was thought to have been resolved overnight but some companies have continued to report intermittent service, severely disrupting their businesses.

Procam, a British camera equipment hiring company, spends £150 a month on Microsoft’s email services for essential communication with customers. Don Grant, head of systems, said Procam had received little support or explanation from Microsoft.

“It’s shocking,” Mr Grant explained. “We basically have to tell them that their systems are down.

“We couldn’t even get on as administrators into admin panel.”

The issue affected Procam and others all day on Thursday, before a backlog of emails began flooding through overnight. On Friday, the issue returned for some, bringing only intermittent access.

“We’re working to resolve difficulties a limited subset of enterprise customers in Europe are experiencing when attempting to access Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said in response.

“Consumers are not affected. Admins can find status updates on the Admin Center.”