Microsoft is trying to come up with short- and long-term fixes after users were unable to use the search functionality in multiple Microsoft 365 services, the company said in a Tweet on Monday.

"We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to use the search functionality in multiple Microsoft 365 services," Microsoft said in a tweet. The service was yet to be fully restored on Tuesday.

Outlook on the web, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook desktop clients were among the affected services. 

In a subsequent tweet, Microsoft said it has developed a fix to address the issue and was validating it internally before deploying.

"We're exploring if an ECS configuration change may provide quicker relief," the company said. Microsoft was posting regular updates about the issue on its Microsoft 365 Status handle on Twitter.

On Tuesday morning, Microsoft confirmed that the search functionality had been restored for certain users. "We've confirmed that search availability has been returned back to the service for some tenants. We are continuing to implement our changes to fully restore availability, " Microsoft said in a Tweet. 

The company is yet to clarify the cause of the issue and the specific regions affected by the incident. 

Series of outages for Microsoft

The latest outage is the fourth such service disruption faced by Microsoft this year. Each of the outages so far has involved at least some of the Microsoft 365 services.

Last week, users were unable to access Microsoft 365 web applications and Teams. Microsoft said it investigated the errors within the caching infrastructure and high CPU utilization on components that process backend navigation feature APIs. The services were subsequently restored.

In February, Microsoft suffered a global outage due to which users were unable to access emails on Outlook or use the collaboration suite Teams.

In January, Microsoft had to investigate a global outage affecting products and services including Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business along with Teams and Outlook. Two hours into the outage, Microsoft said it was rolling back a network change that they believed was causing the outage.