Snow day in corporate world thanks to another frustrating Microsoft Teams outage

Corporate communications ground to a halt for many Office 365 subscribers around the world on Friday after a network outage left Microsoft Teams unresponsive for them for several hours.

The IT goliath said it became aware of the breakdown around 1455 UTC, with a service bulletin reporting that at least some customers may experience errors, missing or delayed messages, and/or the inability to upload or download documents using Teams.

"We apologize for the inconvenience; our engineering team is aware and actively working to resolve the current Teams outage," Redmond shared via Xitter.

The issue was quickly attributed to a "networking issue," but whatever caused the problem was limited to the online chat'n'meeting app Teams. "We've completed a failover in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region and telemetry is showing improvement," the bulletin read.

In the Americas, however, attempts to bring Teams back online failed to achieve the desired effect. "Our failover operation did not provide the anticipated relief to end users in North and South America regions and we are now working to optimize traffic patterns as part of the mitigation effort," the service bulletin read.

By 2212 UTC, Microsoft reported that its efforts to resolve the outage were showing signs of improvement, with netizens commenting that messages were once again mostly flowing. However as of writing, Microsoft's Office Service Health page still showed Teams as down.

What caused the global partial outage and why the network fix worked in EMEA but not in the Americas remains unclear. We've reached out to Microsoft for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back.

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The timing of the outage suggests the issue may have been related to a broader infrastructure problem. Around the time Teams began acting up, Ookla's Downdetector showed a marked uptick in issues accessing Google and Azure services.

Whether these incidents are just coincidental, it's worth noting that this is hardly the first time Teams has logged off early for the day leaving users in the lurch. In 2023 Microsoft suffered repeated outages across its cloud and Office 365 properties, including one that occurred almost exactly a year ago yesterday. ®