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OneDrive is broken: Microsoft's cloudy storage drops from the sky for EU users

Wonderful, wonderful

It is OneDrive's turn to get a beating with the stick of fail as the service took a tumble this morning.

Issues first began appearing at around 08:00 GMT as users around Europe logged in, expecting to find their files, and found instead a picture of a bicycle with a flat tyre or a dropped ice cream cone. Oh, you guys!

The fact that Microsoft has a wide variety of images to illustrate failure will be of little comfort to users that depend on the cloud storage system.

OneDrive is Microsoft's answer to the likes of DropBox and its ilk, allowing users to stash files (up to 1TB for an individual Office 365 subscriber) on Redmond's servers and synchronise them to their devices or access through a web client.

Except now it doesn't. We checked it out at Vulture Central and found that, yes, synchronisation had stopped, and while it was possible to log into the web portal for a teasing look at one's files, actually trying to open them resulted in an error.

Even local Office 365 apps, such as Word, are jolly unhappy, reporting errors on saving documents due to the inaccessibility of the cloudy storage. The experience is a lesson on the consequences of too much dependence on the cloud.

Microsoft's OneDrive support orifice spent the early part of the outage in denial, asking users to clear their browser cache and cookies to sort the problem while managing not to see the tsunami of shrieks from afflicted customers.

It has since updated its support page and admitted that, gosh and heck, there are issues. The team are “reviewing system telemetry to isolate the source of the issue and determine the next troubleshooting steps” and promise an update by 11:30 UTC.

Scant comfort to those who rely on the service as a substitute for emailing files to themselves or an alternative to carrying around a USB stick of data.

We have, of course, contacted Microsoft to find out what is happening and will update with any response. ®

Updated 12:00 UTC to add:

It looks like OneDrive is slowly coming back to life, with some users reporting success in accessing their files. Microsoft reckons that a "networking issue" is to blame and so is re-routing user connections around the problem.

A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "We've addressed an issue in which some customers in parts of Europe experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive files and folders."

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