Microsoft’s WSUS Infrastructure Experienced a 12-Hour Outage

Reports starting rolling in late last night that many trying to sync their WSUS servers with Microsoft were failing. On Twitter, on Facebook, and on the Patch Management email listserv, customers were unable to get their servers to sync updates.

Additionally, some were able to discover the following error message:

The upstream server experienced an unexpected error. Please try again at a later time.

Early this morning, WSUS started working again, however, Microsoft has yet to deliver communication about what caused the problem.

Researching through the Microsoft Services Status Dashboard, I was able to uncover the following…

Note that Microsoft originally identified the problem due to an Intune issue, but that it resulted in determining that administrators couldn’t receive recently published updates through Microsoft Update or Windows Update. The outage, as reported, was almost 12 hours.