Microsoft Teams down for more than eight hours globally, in a recovery phase now [Update]

A large number of the Teams features impacted by this event have either completely recovered or undergone dramatic enhancements. We are keeping a close eye on the workstreams and remedies to handle any potential impact scenarios that may still be related to this incident.

Was it a happy outage during which you could unwind, or did anything vital to the objective go wrong? In any case, according to status updates from Microsoft’s official account, “a fraction” of Microsoft Teams was unavailable on Friday for more than eight hours, with outages occurring in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North America, and South America.

Microsoft tweeted at 8:17 p.m. ET on Friday to let people know that although the worst is passed, the business is still cleaning up and there are still a few difficulties.

Present situation: As mentioned in the More information section above, our monitoring systems have alerted us to a problem where users may encounter different impact situations in Microsoft Teams. We’ve discovered that there is a networking problem affecting a certain area of the Microsoft Teams service. Telemetry is improving after we finished the failover in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) area. In order to mitigate the effect, we’re still working to failover service traffic in all impacted areas.

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Therefore, that’s probably the reason why you were unable to use Microsoft’s business communication tool to speak with your coworkers today. There have been complaints of customers not being able to enter onto Teams at all, as well as of delays, lost attachments, and other issues.

You should be able to log in, load messages, view media, and access call recordings at this point, according to Microsoft. However, anonymous users might still be unable to join meetings, there might still be delays, it might be difficult to rejoin meetings or load Copilot history, and you should probably avoid restarting your computer if you need to log into Teams because that was also a problem.

Well, not until Microsoft officially declares everything clear.

This is the company’s current overall guidance:

As we continue to implement mitigations and optimize traffic, many of the Teams features that were impacted by this event are seeing notable improvements. We are assessing the residual impact scenarios and creating workstreams and remedies to deal with any residual effects of this incident.

When we first published our story, a rise in problem complaints at DownDetector indicated that the outage had been ongoing for at least three hours. Microsoft formally acknowledged the issue at around 11:45 AM ET. According to the firm, failovers were implemented in order to address “a networking issue impacting a segment of the Teams service.”

However, Microsoft stated four hours later that “Not all end customers in North and South America areas received instant relief from our failover operation.” Although the DownDetector surge has decreased, it’s unclear if this is because services have been significantly restored or because there is no longer any need to file a complaint.

At 11:45 a.m. Eastern time today, Microsoft initially revealed that Teams was experiencing issues on its Microsoft 365 Status X (formerly Twitter) account, stating, “We’re investigating an issue impacting numerous Microsoft Teams services.” The business “discovered a networking issue impacting a segment of the Teams service,” according to a follow-up X post made at 12:17 p.m. Eastern time, adding it was “doing a failover to remedy impact.”

Our failover operation did not provide immediate relief to all end users in North and South America regions. However, we’re seeing improvements as we continue to optimize traffic patterns and apply configuration changes intended to reduce (cont) https://t.co/yed1jveb6I

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) January 26, 2024

By the eight-hour mark, Microsoft had achieved the following:

Even though many customers are still impacted by this issue, we’re still applying mitigations throughout the affected infrastructure, and our telemetry indicates further improvements in the user experience. In addition, while our larger remediation plan is being implemented, we’re working in parallel to deliver solutions to address specific impacted Teams features. We are now assessing every possible workstream that might help us lessen the effect on the remaining clients.

Though I’m sure most admins are already aware of this, you can check the status at TM710344 if you have access to a Microsoft Teams admin interface.

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Microsoft’s status page remained all green for hours after the outage started, indicating that Microsoft Teams was operating normally. However, just before 2:00 PM ET, it changed to this description:

• Title: Several problems with Microsoft Teams may arise for certain individuals

• Impact on users: There might be a variety of problems with Microsoft Teams for users.

• Further details: Affected situations consist of, but are not restricted to:

• Users that do a cold boot may get a “oops” screen and be unable to log into Teams.

• After a while, users who log in or unlock their smartphones can notice missing messages.

• Users’ messages in chat rooms and channels might not load.

• Users’ material (pictures, videos, audio, call recordings, and code snippets) cannot be viewed or downloaded.

• There can be a delay in the sending of some messages.

• Call recordings may take longer to show up in users’ SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business accounts.

• Attachments might not be downloadable by bots.

There might be a delay in both sending and receiving read receipt notices.

Previously

A four-hour outage occurred in Microsoft Teams around one year back. It experienced two significant disruptions in 2021, as well as ones in 2020 and 2019, but this outage that lasted more than eight hours may win out, depending on how many people were impacted in any case.

Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24051966/microsoft-teams-down-outage
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-teams-is-currently-down-for-a-large-number-of-users/

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