Microsoft Teams, Office 365 suffer major outage globally

Microsoft’s Teams app was facing major outage on Thursday morning with thousands of users unable to access or leverage any features on the app.

More than 4,000 users have reported issues with Microsoft Teams so far, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks outages by collating status reports from sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

The tech major also confirmed the outage and said that it was investigating the matter. In a tweet, Microsoft officials said, “We've received reports of users being unable to access Microsoft Teams or leverage any features. We're investigating the issue and further updates can be found in your Service Health Dashboard via TM402718.” 

The web monitoring firm also showed there were more than 150 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft Office 365. The same account also provided a possible cause for the outage.

In a separate tweet, the official Microsoft 365 Twitter account said, “We’ve determined that a recent deployment contained a broken connection to an internal storage service, which has resulted in impact. We’re working to direct traffic to a healthy service to mitigate impact. Additional information can be found in the admin center under TM402718.”

On June 20, users have suffered from ongoing outage that affected multiple Microsoft 365 services, with customers worldwide reporting delays, sign-in failures, and issues accessing their accounts. “They were asked to re-login, emails stuck in queues and not getting delivered, while others say they were unable to access their Exchange Online mailboxes via any connection method they tried,” Bleeping Computers reported, adding that the affected services include the Exchange Online hosted email platform for businesses and the Microsoft Teams communication platform, as well.

Not just that. In November last year, Microsoft 365 was affected by another outage that prevented users from accessing files stored on the SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Office, and Microsoft Teams cloud storage services.

Last month, an outage caused by US-based content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company Cloudflare, brought down hundreds of high-profile online platforms and services, with users saw widespread 500 internal server errors.

Outages are not uncommon in the tech universe though. There have been multiple outages especially over the last 1-2 years involving big tech companies, including Twitter, Amazon, Facebook and Instagram. In October last year, users suffered from a near 6-7 hours disruption at Meta Platforms keeping WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users.