14 DAY TRIAL // A series of Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, are currently down worldwide with users no longer able to connect.
Microsoft Teams is one of the services whose adoption skyrocketed in the last few months for obvious reasons, but with more people connecting remotely, it has become quite a challenge for Microsoft to make sure that everything is running correctly.
While it’s not yet clear what caused the issue, Microsoft says it’s already investigating the problems and trying to bring all services back online.
“We've received reports of users experiencing issues accessing their Exchange Online accounts via Outlook on the Web. Our initial investigation indicates that India-based users are the primarily impacted audience. Further details can be found in your admin center under EX223208,” Microsoft says.
According to DownDetector, while connectivity issues have also been experienced in the United States, Europe the one primarily affected by the outage, with Outlook down in most parts of the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, and France. Other countries were hit too, including Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Romania.
India is the hardest hit by the outage, Microsoft confirmed.
The downtime comes only a few days after Microsoft’s online services experienced another outage, and the software giant says it’s now investigating the recent changes to see if they’re a possible cause of the problems.
“We’ve collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols. Additionally, we’ve identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide. We’re reviewing recent changes to our service to further determine the cause of impact. Users may experience problems with various Exchange Online protocols including Outlook desktop, mobile devices as well as those dependent on REST functionality,” the company said in an update for the problem.
In most of the cases, trying to log in to Microsoft accounts fails with a typical “something went wrong” error, and of course, there’s not much users and IT admins can do to restore the services.
The outage started nearly five hours ago, and Microsoft says that it’s already restoring it, as it determined that a configuration update is the culprit for the downtime. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Microsoft services are back online for everybody, but the outage is resolved gradually and it should be gone for all users in a few hours.
“We've determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of impact. We've reverted the update and are monitoring the service for recovery. Rollback has mitigated impact for the affected features in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams (SI#MO223247). For impact to the Exchange service (SI# EX223208), majority of the users are seeing recovery and we’re taking measures to ensure full recovery for all our users worldwide,” the company says.
In a reply to a user on Twitter, Microsoft says this isn’t a global outage, though it’s pretty clear that plenty of regions across the world are currently affected.
The usage of Microsoft services has skyrocketed in the last six months, and the company itself announced earlier this year that it was implemented additional changes to make sure that the essential functionality remains up and running. However, since the number of users connecting at the same time keeps increasing, it’s pretty clear that it’s getting more difficult for Microsoft to keep everything online.
At the time of writing this article, the recovery is still under way for the impacted users across Europe.