UPDATE: The outage now appears to be over, with Microsoft's status page no longer showing any issues. However we will keep monitoring for any further updates.
Top video conferencing service Microsoft Teams has suffered a significant outage that affected users across the world logging on for work.
Data from DownDetector showed that issues began at roughly 7am GMT/11pm ET, preventing users from logging in and causing a big spike in complaints.
The outage appeared to be part of a wider issue affecting the entire Microsoft 365 platform, with Outlook users also reporting issues.
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Good morning - if you're just logging on for work and having problems with Microsoft 365 - you aren't alone.
The platform is seeing widespread issues, with users across Europe and Asia unable to access a number of services, including Microsoft Teams and Outlook.
The good news is that Microsoft does appear to have noted the problem, so a fix may not be too far off.
"We're investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services. More info can be found in the admin center under MO502273," the Microsoft 365 Status twitter account said.
More information from Microsoft - seems it has found the cause of the problem, but things aren't fixed just yet.
We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps. You can find additional information on our status page at https://t.co/pZt32fOafR or on SHD under MO502273.January 25, 2023
As that tweet mentioned, users can see more information on the official Microsoft 365 "Service Health Status" page.
It doesn't make for particularly good reading right now though...
"Users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services," the alert reads, noting that the following services are affected:
Microsoft Teams
Exchange Online
Outlook
SharePoint Online
OneDrive for Business
Microsoft Graph
"We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps," it adds, noting any user serviced by the affected infrastructure may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.
For anyone still being affected by this issue, there could be good news soon.
Although there's been no official confirmation, the Microsoft 365 service status page is showing no issues any more, with the cheery note that "everything is up and running".
Outage reports are also falling on DownDetector following a massive spike earlier today - but until we've had an official tweet from Microsoft, it might not be worth getting carried away just yet....
Another update from Microsoft, which says it's identified the cause of the issue now.
"We’ve isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue, and we are analyzing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing additional impact. We’ll provide more information once we have additional information."
It adds that some users will still be unable to access services such as Teams and Outlook, but that it is working on a fix.
More possible progress - the particular Microsoft 365 gremlin appears to have been identified...
We've rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact. We're monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect.January 25, 2023
It's all gone very quiet on the Microsoft side, but DownDetector is still showing hundreds of complaints across Microsoft 365 as a whole, along with Teams and Outlook issues, so we're guessing the fix hasn't fully kicked in yet.
On its Service Health Status page, Microsoft has extended the list of affected services, with some new entries:
Microsoft Teams
Exchange Online
Outlook
SharePoint Online
OneDrive for Business
Microsoft Graph
PowerBi
M365 Admin Portal
Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Defender for Identity
Microsoft is now saying that its fix is taking hold, with some previosuly affected users now able to access the tools they need.
"We’ve identified that a wide-area networking (WAN) routing change caused impact to the service. We’ve rolled back the change and monitoring the service as it recovers. Some of the customers who had previously reported impact are also reporting recovery," it noted on the Service Health Status page.
Outage reports are continuing to fall on DownDetector, but some new complaints are beginning to surface.
As the US comes online, it may be that the issues re-arise, or even worsen - we've certainly seen that happen before.
Still nothing concrete from Microsoft just yet - the last we heard, the company said it was "continuing to monitor the recovery".
With users still complaining of outages on DownDetector though, it could be that the fix isn't full operational just yet...
Good news - Microsoft does think the issue is finally recovering sufficiently.
"We're monitoring telemetry which continues to show that the service is stable, and the majority of users are able to access the service successfully," it wrote in its latest update on the Service Health Status page.
"We’re continuing to monitor the service and take actions to confirm full recovery."
Well, it seems that the saga may, at last, be over.
The Microsoft Service Health Status page is currently showing no problems, and despite the lack of a formal tweet, everything now seems to be back to normal.
We'll continue monitoring for any further problems, outages, or issues, but for now at least, this latest Microsoft Teams catastrophe could be at an end.
