The popular Microsoft Teams business communications platform is back to normal after a disruption blocked access to the messaging and video conferencing program. Teams is part of Microsoft’s 365 software suite and has become an essential tool for many organizations that work remotely or in a hybrid work environment. On back-to-back days this week, users needed help logging in to some Microsoft services, including Outlook and Teams.
A coding issue caused the problems and led to a network failure that kept many Teams users from logging in or being able to use the software. The company initially communicated these issues to customers as only affecting North American users, but community responses and feedback indicated the impact stretched beyond the continent.
According to Down Detector, a website that tracks internet outages, Microsoft Teams was down for a large portion of the day Friday and Saturday, with reports flooding in from around the world. The site indicated that 75% of reported issues involved the app, 16% were related to service connection, and 9% centered on website-related problems.
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In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Microsoft’s official office account for communicating service incidents, the company reported that it had “identified and corrected a networking issue that was causing a portion of the service to fail.” Microsoft X also said that it had completed a failover in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and that its telemetry showed that Teams’ service was improving.
Those unable to log in to their Teams accounts reported issues with sharing and viewing images, videos, audio recordings, and code snippets, as well as the inability to access channels and chats. Other problems included the inability to access messages and, in some cases, to upload or download files.
While Microsoft continues to monitor the situation, the company hopes to have everything fully restored by late Sunday morning. In a separate post on X, the company detailed why it had been unable to resolve the problem earlier in the day. These included a “difficulty in routing around the failures” as it worked to reroute data traffic and prevent further outages.
It needs to be made clear how many users were affected by the outages, but thousands took to social media to grumble about the problems and express their frustration with the company. It’s an unfortunate incident that could negatively affect companies that depend on Teams as a hub for their remote workforces and collaborative work. The platform has numerous security features to protect sensitive information, such as two-factor authentication and encryption in transit and at rest.