Microsoft Teams has started making some serious waves as the go-to choice for enterprise collaboration. Everywhere you look, people are adopting Microsoft as their all-in-one solution for productivity and teamwork. With Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Outlook, and more, Microsoft can quickly transform an entire workforce.
Unfortunately, businesses adopting a Microsoft-first tech stack face some serious problems with the cloud-based portfolio stutters. On the 28th of September 2020, Microsoft suffered from a massive outage across the United States. Users of everything from Microsoft Teams to Office 365, Exchange, Outlook, SharePoint, Azure, and OneDrive suddenly couldn’t log into their accounts.
The problems started to emerge around 5pm ET, and service didn’t return to normal until 10pm E.T for many customers. So, where did the issue come from?
Where Did the Problem Begin?
This isn’t the first outage that Microsoft has experienced in recent years. The company, alongside competitors like Slack, Cisco, and Zoom occasionally face issues with technology not working quite the way it should. However, when an issue is as big as the latest outage from Microsoft, customers are often left wondering whether a cybersecurity issue is at the root of the problem.
The good news is that so far, there doesn’t seem to be any sign that Microsoft’s problem was the result of a cyber-attack, or any ongoing problems. After users took to Twitter to complain that they couldn’t access their favourite workplace tools, Microsoft 365 responded with a status message. According to the team, they identified a “recent change” that may have caused the issue:
We’ve identified a recent change that appears to be the source of the issue. We’re rolling back the change to mitigate impact. Please follow https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl for updates on this issue if you are unable to access the admin portal.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 28, 2020
Unfortunately, the Microsoft experts quickly followed up the first tweet, confirming that rolling back the new change hadn’t solved the problem. Another 2 hours later, Microsoft reported significant improvements in services after “rerouting traffic” to another infrastructure.
This vague announcement left some customers wondering whether the initial problems came from a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. However, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN that the company had no evidence that the problem came from “malicious activity”.
The Details Remain Murky
Microsoft has since updated its status on Twitter to say that a certain segment of its infrastructure wasn’t supporting authentication requests as it should. Reports suggest that the core problem came from some problematic code that stopped the infrastructure from processing log-in requests as quickly as it was supposed to.
However, for the meantime, Microsoft hasn’t gone too in-depth to explain what actually happened to the ecosystem. Though the tech leaders have officially confirmed that the problem has been resolved, and customers can now access their accounts again, the question of why the issue happened in the first place remains unanswered.
