Microsoft Teams and Outlook were down hard, company examining issue

Widespread issues were reported by many people, and Microsoft has found the culprit

We rely on the internet for almost everything we do these days, and for all of us remote workers out there, a stable connection and functional services are even more important. That’s why you’ll quickly notice when something is wrong with the core services you use, and for many people, that was the case for Microsoft 365 for a few hours this week. The company has confirmed that its email service Outlook and its Slack competitor Microsoft Teams were experiencing issues. If you couldn’t access them for a while, things should go back to normal right now.

Microsoft first acknowledged the issue on Twitter at 2:30 am ET, saying that it’s “investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.” Specifically, the company lists Microsoft Teams, its Exchange Online servers, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business. Microsoft Graph, PowerBi, and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center as affected. It’s possible that the problem didn’t affect everyone equally, though. For example, some people reported that Outlook works just fine for them while they couldn’t access Microsoft Teams.

On Downdetector.com, outage reports for all kinds of Microsoft services spiked for a few hours, indicating that thousands of people are affected. Many reports were pouring in from India, where the outage hit in the middle of the workday. There were also many incidents in Europe and Australia, so it seems like the issue was spread worldwide. Despite the influx of reports, it’s unclear how many people exactly were affected. Given how many customers Microsoft has, it’s possible that there is only a smaller percentage of affected total users.

In the meantime, Microsoft said that it identified the cause, with networking configuration issues at hand. The company shared that it has rolled back a network change that it believes caused the issue.

By now, many people report that they are already able to get back into their services, though. Administrators can find further information on Microsoft’s status page.

This same week, Microsoft Teams competitor Slack experienced a similar outage, although here, the problem mostly affected threads only, conversations revolving around a given individual message in a Slack channel.