Some users encountered an outage with Microsoft Teams, which affected access and limited features, on Friday. The issue began at approximately 11 a.m. EST and quickly escalated in scale, according to outage tracker DownDetector. Users reported difficulties accessing the service, delays in sending and receiving messages, and problems with displaying graphics. According to Microsoft, the outage was caused by “a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service.” The company has since moved some services to backup systems in an effort to address the problem. The backup transition for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East was completed at around 1:30 p.m. EST, with improvements being observed. However, the backup switchovers for North and South America were still ongoing. While outage reports initially decreased, they later stabilized, indicating ongoing issues.
Microsoft Teams is a messaging and videoconferencing app with over 320 million monthly average users as of September 2023. Despite efforts to address the outage, some users in the U.S. continued to experience service issues, prompting sarcastic comments from frustrated individuals. Microsoft acknowledged that the backup switchover did not immediately resolve all issues in North and South America, but affirmed its commitment to mitigating the impact on customers as quickly as possible.
In response to queries about the outage, Microsoft referred to additional details available in a document posted in an administrative dashboard for Microsoft 365 software. However, the company’s public tweets on the matter were the only information it was willing to share. According to a document obtained by The Associated Press, the outage caused approximately a dozen different issues, including difficulty logging into the service, missing or delayed messages, and problems accessing various media types. A subsequent update from Microsoft mentioned that efforts to work around the problems had led to backend system issues, resulting in data traffic slowdowns.
As of 5:02 p.m. EST, Microsoft acknowledged that many customers were still impacted by the issue, but reported a reduction in errors and an increase in service availability. The company stated that it was working to address specific failures of Teams functions alongside its broader network efforts. According to DownDetector, reported issues with Teams had declined significantly and were close to normal levels as of 7:45 p.m. EST.
