Part of the world's IT brought down by Azure Active Directory issue

Alas, poor Redmond has acknowledged the Azure Active Directory is "having issues" alongside the disappearance of its Office 365 service in the UK and Europe.

Microsoft's Office 365 service went down earlier this morning, and Microsoft has now copped to an issue affecting Azure Active Directory.

Azure's status page reveals:

Starting at approximately 09:00 on 3rd Dec, 2015, customers began experiencing intermittent issues accessing Azure services that use, or have dependencies on, Azure Active Directory.

Engineering teams are actively investigating the root cause of the issue and are developing a mitigation strategy. A list of services reporting impact will be provided shortly. An update will be provided in 60 minutes, or as events warrant.

Under the heading "Services Experiencing Downstream Impact from Azure Active Directory" Azure's status page additionally clarified:

Engineers are engaged on an underlying Azure Active Directory issue impacted several Azure properties that rely on the service. Services currently reporting impact include Web App, Operational Insights, Machine Learning, portal.azure.com and manage.windowsazure.com. Updates to this message will be provided as events warrant.

One Reg reader whose office has thoroughly adopted the cloud informed us of the savagery this outage is causing their colleagues to stoop to: "Some people seem to have got a connection, but most of us have now given up and some have even taken the drastic measure of actually talking to each other. It's most unnatural!"

We have asked Microsoft for more information and will update this story accordingly. ®