Microsoft Teams was back up for most users, the company said on Thursday, after an hours-long outage that disrupted the chat application globally.
The company cited a disruption on a recent software update that “contained a broken connection to an internal storage service”.
“We’re addressing any residual impact related to this event. Additionally, we are monitoring for any signs of failure until we’re confident that all functions of the service are fully recovered,” the company said on its website.
Teams, used by more than 270 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.
The company did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption.
During the outage, most users were unable to exchange messages or use any features of the application. Many users took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
“Microsoft Teams has stopped, and half the working world along with it #MicrosoftTeams,” a Twitter user said.
Downstream impact
Microsoft also confirmed downstream impact to multiple Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration, such as Microsoft Word, Office Online and SharePoint Online.
The company has benefited from a surge in demand for remote business teleconferencing and messaging tools, with Teams becoming a key fixture for organisations during the Covid-19 pandemic as people worked from homes.
Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour disruption at Meta Platforms that kept WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users last October. — Akriti Sharma, with Shivam Patel and Anirudh Saligrama, (c) 2022 Reuters
