Microsoft said it is investigating an issue impacting multiple services including Teams and Outlook, with outage reports saying the platforms were down for thousands of users globally.
Microsoft on Wednesday did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 900 incidents in South Africa and 3 900 in India. Outage reports also spiked in Australia, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.
The Downdetector site tracks outages by collating status reports from sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.
“We’ve determined the network connectivity issue is occurring with devices across the Microsoft wide-area network,” Microsoft said. This impacts connectivity between clients on the Internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centres, it said.
Microsoft added in a tweet it had rolled back a network change that it believed was causing the issue. “We’re monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect,” it said.
During the outage, most users were unable to exchange messages, join calls or use any features of the Teams application. Many users took to Twitter to share updates about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
Microsoft Teams, used by more than 280 million people globally, forms an integral part of daily operations for businesses and schools, which use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organise their workflow.
Not uncommon
Among the other services affected are Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, according to the company’s status page.
Outages of Big Tech platforms are not uncommon as several companies ranging from Google to Meta have seen service disruptions. Azure, the second largest cloud services provider after Amazon, faced outages last year.
However, with increased dependence on online platforms due to more employees working from home in the last three years any outage has a greater impact. — Akriti Sharma, (c) 2023 Reuters