Microsoft is investigating an outage that blocks some administrators with business or enterprise subscriptions from accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center.

While the company has yet to disclose which regions are affected by this ongoing service degradation, it is tracking it on its official service health status page to provide impacted organizations with up-to-date information.

“Some users in the North America region may be unable to access the Microsoft 365 admin center. We’re reviewing service monitoring telemetry to isolate the root cause and develop a remediation plan,” Microsoft said when it acknowledged the issue.

“Initial reports indicate that the issue is occurring in the North America regions. We’ll provide more information once identified.”

Although Microsoft didn’t disclose how many customers are impacted, the company has classified this issue as an incident, which usually involves noticeable user impact.

On the outage-tracking website DownDetector, thousands of Microsoft customers have reported issues, including connection problems and an extremely slow admin portal.

In an update to the original incident report, Microsoft said that the outage also affects the M365 app and that it’s now collecting telemetry data to identify the root cause.

“Users able to access the admin center may be experiencing degraded functionality. As functionality is degraded, users may be unable to raise support tickets through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Additionally, users may be unable to access the M365 app,” Microsoft noted.

“We’re continuing to analyze diagnostic data from the Microsoft 365 admin center infrastructure, with a current focus on usage patterns and Central Processing Unit (CPU) utilization levels. Additionally, we’re reviewing HTTP Archive (HAR) files provided by impacted users to support our investigation.

More than a year ago, in January, Microsoft addressed another critical service issue that blocked login attempts and prevented users and administrators from accessing Microsoft 365 services and the admin center.

In July 2025, it mitigated a similar outage that triggered ‘Runtime Error’ messages, preventing access to the admin portal.

Over the weekend, the company restored Microsoft Store and Windows Update services that had been taken down after a data center power outage, causing “failures or timeouts when installing or updating Microsoft Store apps, or when downloading Windows updates.”

This is a developing story …