Several Office 365 tools and the collaboration platform have been affected by a global outage reported by the tech giant. Thousands of Microsoft Teams users worldwide could not access the service this morning. Outlook email platform has also been experiencing widespread problems. According to Microsoft, the problem can be attributed to an issue with the network configuration they are investigating.
The team’s users in India were the first to report problems, but now it seems they are also affecting users in Europe. It has been reported that more than 5,000 users in the UK alone have reported issues with Teams, as stated on the Downdetector website, which monitors internet service availability across the globe. Microsoft reported on Twitter that it is experiencing issues with “multiple services” in Office 365. Network configuration issues have been isolated, and we’re analyzing the best mitigation strategy to address them without causing additional impacts.
The company posted its latest update at 9:26 am: “We’ve rolled back a network change causing impact.”. The service will be monitored as the rollback takes place.” The Xbox Live gaming service is also affected. At the same time, the company disclosed a “connectivity issue” with its cloud computing platform Azure that is affecting “a subset of users.”
Even though outages of Microsoft Teams and other cloud services provided by the company, as well as its rival hyper-scale public cloud platforms such as Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud, are rare, when they do happen, the impact on businesses that have come to rely on these products can be very significant.
One of the last major outages with Microsoft Teams happened in July when several users could not access the service and other Office 365 products. According to the company at the time, the problem was due to a broken connection between an internal storage service and a recent deployment, which impacted the service. The company’s infrastructure was also put under strain earlier this month when its cloud storage service OneDrive and its video calling platform Skype suffered sweeping outages simultaneously. Microsoft attributed these problems to the changes made to the apps just before the problems occurred.
