Microsoft Outlook, Teams, other services down globally

Microsoft services, including MS Teams, Outlook and Microsoft 365, are down for thousands of users across the world. Most of the outage incidents have been reported from India. A system outage or downtime is the complete or partial failure of that system or service(s), affecting multiple users.

According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, there have been over 3,900 incidents of people reporting issues in India, and over 900 in Japan. There were also reports of outages in Australia, the UK and United Arab Emirates (UAE), among other countries.

Microsoft Azure, the company's public cloud platform also faced an outage which could mean that the server hosting Microsoft services has been impacted. Besides, LinkedIn, a popular professional social media platform, is also witnessing an outage. 

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue in a tweet: "We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps.” 

The cloud unit Azure also tweeted about the issue separately. "We are currently investigating a networking issue impacting connectivity to Azure for a subset of users," it said. 

Due to the outage, most users on Microsoft teams were unable to send and receive messages, join scheduled calls, or use any features of the 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 is used by more than 280 million people globally, and is now a key part of business meeting, where users make calls, schedule meetings and organise their workflow. 

Among the other services affected were Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, according to the company's status page. 

Tech glitches and outages (often called downtime) are becoming common, and have a significant impact on the reputation and bottom line.   

In July last year, Microsoft’s Teams app faced major outage with more than 5,000 users globally saying that they were unable to access or leverage any features on the app.     

More recently on December 29, 2022, Twitter suffered an outage with several users globally complained that they were unable to access the web version of the micro-blogging platform while some others complained that their Twitter notifications were also not working. 

Analyst firm Gartner has said in a June 2021 report that the average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute or around $300,000 per hour.