Microsoft reports “ global ” teams, Azure outage

Microsoft on Monday reported a global outage affecting the Teams collaboration app, as well as “several” other Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 services.

On the Microsoft 365 Service Health Status web page, the company revealed that “users may not be able to access multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services,” which leaves Microsoft Teams down for many years. many users.

[Related: Partners: Office 365 Outages Suggest Microsoft Is Getting Overwhelmed]

The problems – revealed by Microsoft on Twitter as of 3:40 p.m. EST Monday – could affect any user “around the world,” the company said.

According to initial reports, “the main impact is on Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft said.

However, “users may not be able to access multiple Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365 services, including the Service Health dashboard,” the company said. “Any service that leverages Azure Active Directory (AAD) can be affected. This includes, but is not limited to, Microsoft Teams, Forms, Exchange Online, Intune, and Yammer. “

A map of outages on Downdetector (pictured above), a website that tracks outages, showed team issues affecting users in many major cities in the United States and Canada, including New York, Washington, Chicago, Toronto , San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Microsoft blamed the teams and the Azure outage on “an issue with a recent change to an authentication system.”

At approximately 5:00 p.m. EST, the company reported on the Microsoft 365 service health status page that “we have identified the underlying cause of the problem and are taking action to mitigate it. ‘impact.”

In response to a request from CRN, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Monday that “We are working to resolve issues that a subset of customers may experience when authenticating to certain services. We are currently deploying mitigation measures. “

At 5:57 p.m. EST, Microsoft tweeted that “The update has completed its rollout in all affected regions. Microsoft 365 services show decreasing error rates in telemetry. “

An IT manager who was grappling with Monday’s outage told CRN that “I can’t even go to the Microsoft console to see what’s going on.”

“Anytime you see a spike from vendors like this on Downdetector, it’s bad,” said the CIO, who did not want to be identified. “But until you understand the cause, you don’t know if it’s going to take them five minutes or five hours to fix it.”

The IT director said Microsoft’s issues could be related to the rapid growth of the Teams app. “Teams has grown faster than any other Microsoft service, faster than SharePoint, faster than Office 365. It just exploded. I wonder if [the growth of] Teams contribute to these problems. “

This is at least the third time that major issues have affected the widely used Teams collaboration app since early February. Microsoft has reported issues with delays in receiving Teams chats on February 17 and attending Teams meetings on February 4.

Bob Venero, CEO of Holbrook, New York-based solutions provider Future Tech, No.96 on CRN’s 500 solution provider for 2020, said Microsoft’s latest outage is another example of the negative impact on businesses. companies when customers put all their “eggs in the public cloud basket” versus a hybrid cloud approach that includes their own infrastructure.

“This has a very significant financial impact on organizations using these cloud offerings,” said Venero. “The longer it lasts, the more damage there is. The resulting lack of information is even worse. Right now, customers don’t know what they’re up against or when it’s going to be resolved. “

Venero said he sees the outage as yet another reason to advise customers to invest in on-premise infrastructure for mission-critical applications.

“If you look at what’s mission-critical for most businesses, # 1 is finance and # 2 is communications infrastructure, which is often Exchange and Teams,” Venero said. “In this particular case, those critical communication applications are completely out of service. The problem with such an outage is that it is very difficult to get answers for customers who have outsourced their IT to a public cloud provider, rather than outsourcing their IT to a trusted advisor like Future Tech. “

Teams, part of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity application suite, has become an essential tool for countless businesses in North America since the widespread shift to remote work a year ago. Microsoft revealed in late October that Teams had reached 115 million daily active users worldwide, up from 20 million around a year earlier.

Steven Burke contributed to this report.