Microsoft on Monday reported a global outage affecting the Teams collaboration application, as well as “a number” of other Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 services.
On the Microsoft 365 service health status web page, the company reported that “users may not be able to access multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services” – leaving Microsoft Teams aside for many users.
[Related: Partners: Office 365 Outages Suggest Microsoft Is Getting Overwhelmed]
The problems – disclosed by Microsoft on twitter starting at 3:40 pm ET on Monday – it could be affecting any user “worldwide,” the company said.
According to initial reports, the “main impact is for Microsoft Teams,” said Microsoft.
However, “users may not be able to access multiple Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365 services, including the Service Health Dashboard,” said the company. “Any service that uses Azure Active Directory (AAD) can be affected. This includes, but is not limited to, Microsoft Teams, Forms, Exchange Online, Intune and Yammer. “
An outage map on Downdetector (photo above), a site that tracks outages, showed Teams issues affecting users in several major cities in the United States and Canada, including New York, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco and Los Angeles .
Microsoft blamed the interruption of Teams and Azure on “an issue with a recent change to an authentication system”.
We have identified a problem with a recent change to an authentication system. We are reverting the update to mitigate the impact, which we expect to take approximately 15 minutes. Additional information can be found at https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl or at MO244568, if available.
– Microsoft 365 Status (@ MSFT365Status) March 15, 2021
At about 5 pm Eastern Time, the company reported on the Microsoft 365 service health status page that “we have identified the underlying cause of the problem and are taking steps to mitigate the impact.”
In response to a CRN consultation, a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement on Monday that “we are working to resolve the issues that a subset of customers may be experiencing when authenticating with some services. We are currently implementing mitigations ”.
At 17:57 Eastern Time, Microsoft tweeted this “The update has completed deployment in all affected regions. Microsoft 365 services are showing decreasing error rates in telemetry. ”
An IT director who was struggling with the disruption on Monday told CRN that “I can’t get into the Microsoft console to even see what’s going on.”
“Whenever you see a supplier with a peak like this on the Downdetector, it’s bad,” said the IT director, who declined to be identified. “But until you understand what the cause is, you don’t know whether it will take five minutes or five hours to fix it.”
The IT director said Microsoft’s problems could be related to the rapid growth of the Teams application. “Teams grew faster than any other Microsoft service, faster than SharePoint, faster than Office 365. It just exploded. I wonder if [the growth of] The teams are contributing to these problems ”.
It is at least the third time that major issues have affected the Teams collaboration application that has been widely used since the beginning of February. Microsoft reported problems with delays in receiving Teams chats on February 17 and attending Teams meetings on February 4.
Bob Venero, CEO of Future Tech, New York-based solutions provider, No. 96 of CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2020, said that Microsoft’s latest shutdown is another example of the negative business impact when customers put all their “Eggs in the public cloud basket” versus a hybrid cloud approach that includes its own infrastructure.
“This has a very big financial impact on organizations that use these cloud offerings,” said Venero. “The longer it lasts, the more damage is done. The lack of information that comes with this is even worse. At the moment, customers do not know what they are facing or when it will be resolved. “
Venero said he sees the outage as another reason to advise his clients to invest in local infrastructure for mission-critical applications.
“If you look at what is mission critical for most companies, you will see that the first is the financial and the second, the communications infrastructure, which is usually Exchange and teams,” said Venero. “In this specific case, these mission-critical communications applications are completely inactive. The problem with an outage like this is that it is very difficult to get answers for customers who have outsourced their IT to a public cloud provider – instead of outsourcing their IT to a trusted advisor like Future Tech. “
Teams – which is part of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity application suite – has become an essential tool for countless companies in North America since the move to remote work a year ago. Microsoft announced in late October that Teams reached 115 million daily active users worldwide – up from 20 million approximately a year earlier.
Steven Burke contributed to this report.