Microsoft halted a global outage on Monday affecting the Teams collaboration app, as well as other Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 services.
On the Microsoft 365 service’s health status website, the company announced that ‘users may not have access to multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services’ – leaving Microsoft Teams to many users.
[Related: Partners: Office 365 Outages Suggest Microsoft Is Getting Overwhelmed]
The Issues – Announced by Microsoft on Twitter starts at 15:40 Eastern Time on Monday – could affect any user “worldwide”, the company said.
According to initial reports, the “primary impact on Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft said.
“However, users may not have access to various Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365 services, including the Service Health Dashboard,” the company said. Any service that uses Azure Active Directory (AAD) may be affected. These include, but are not limited to, Microsoft Teams, Forms, Exchange Online, Intune, and Yammer. ”
An interruption map on Downdetector (pictured above), a site that detects interruptions, showed the Teams issues affecting users in numerous major cities in the US and Canada, including New York, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Microsoft blames Teams and Azure for interrupting an issue with a recent change to an authentication system. ‘
We have identified an issue with a recent change to an authentication system. We are updating the update to reduce the impact, which we expect will take approximately 15 minutes. Additional information can be found at https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl or under MO244568 if available.
– Microsoft 365 status (@ MSFT365Status) 15 March 2021
Around 5pm Eastern Time, the company reported on the health status page of Microsoft 365 that “we have identified the underlying cause of the problem and are taking steps to reduce the impact.”
In response to a query from CRN, a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement Monday that “we are working to resolve issues that a subset of customers may be verifying in some services. We are currently implementing mitigations. ”
At 17:57 Eastern Time, Microsoft tweeted it “The update has already been used in all affected regions. Microsoft 365 services show declining errors in telemetry. ”
An IT director who struggled with the outage on Monday told CRN: “I can not go into the Microsoft console to see what’s going on first. ‘
“Every time you see any vendor go up on Downdetector like that, it’s bad,” said the IT director, who did not want to be identified. “But until you understand what the cause is, you do not know if it takes five minutes or five hours to correct it.”
The IT director said Microsoft’s issues are related to the rapid growth of the Teams app. ‘Teams have grown faster than any other Microsoft service, faster than SharePoint, faster than Office 365. It’s just exploded. I wonder if [the growth of] Teams contribute to these problems. ”
This is at least the third time that major problems have been used for the Teams collaboration program since the beginning of February. Microsoft reported problems with delays in receiving Teams chats on February 17 and joining Teams meetings on February 4.
Bob Venero, CEO of Holbrook, Solutions Provider Future Tech, NY, no. 96 of CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2020, said the latest Microsoft outage is another example of the negative impact on business as customers ‘basket’ all their eggs in the public cloud versus a hybrid cloud approach that their own include infrastructure.
“It has a huge financial impact on organizations that use these cloud offerings,” Venero said. “The longer it lasts, the more damage is done. The lack of information that accompanies this is even worse. At the moment, customers do not know what they will face or when it will be resolved. ‘
Venero said it sees the outage as another reason to recommend its customers to invest in a solid infrastructure for mission-critical applications.
“If you look at what’s critical to most companies, number 1 is financial and number 2 is communications infrastructure, which is often Exchange and Teams,” Venero said. ‘In this particular case, those communication mission-critical applications are completely off. The problem with an interruption like this is that it is very difficult to get answers for customers who have outsourced their IT to a public cloud provider, rather than obtaining their IT from a reputable consultant like Future Tech. ‘
Teams – part of Microsoft’s Office 365 series of productivity programs – have become an essential tool for many businesses in North America since the widespread shift to remote work a year ago. At the end of October, Microsoft announced that Teams had reached 115 million daily active users worldwide – up from about 20 million a year earlier.
Steven Burke contributed to this report.