Various Microsoft 365 apps and services are down or defective for some users as of 08:45 BST on July 19, 2024.
The problems occurred shortly after an overnight outage of its Azure Cloud across the Central US region.
According to The Register, at 22:56 BST yesterday, the Azure status page noted: “A subset of customers may experience issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region including failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services.”
Yet, while Microsoft has resolved the issue in Azure, many of the 365 apps and services that the cloud supports are still suffering from “the lingering impact” as of the time of writing.
Microsoft Teams is one of those apps. As of 08:45 BST on July 19, 2024, the service status page for the Microsoft 365 admin center notes:
Users may be unable to leverage Microsoft Teams functions including presence, group chats, and user registration.
However, real-time outages monitor Downdetector shows that the situation has vastly improved since the early hours of the morning.
Indeed, at 00:26 on July 19, 2024, over 1,450 incidents related to Microsoft Teams were reported in just 15 minutes.
Other impacted services include Microsoft PowerBI, Fabric, and Purview. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 Admin Center users may struggle to access the app or complete actions without delays.
Thankfully, the other 365 apps appear to be back up and running as normal. But Microsoft does add a few caveats. For instance, some “users may be unable to access Viva Engage.”
Meanwhile, the tech giant warns of intermittent access to several other services, including Microsoft Defender, OneDrive for Business content, and SharePoint Online sites.
Finally, admins could struggle to access existing Cloud PCs or provision new ones while “end users in the impacted region may not be able to access their Cloud PC.”
Sharing a current status update at 07:29 BST this morning, Microsoft noted:
We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.
As for the cause, Microsoft confirmed that the problem stemmed from a configuration change within its back-end workloads. That caused “an interruption” between its compute and storage resources, ultimately leading to connectivity failures and the Azure outage.
Those connectivity failures affected its downstream Microsoft 365 apps and services, which hinge on those connections.
In other words, Microsoft accidentally broke its cloud.
Yet, now that Azure is back up and running, affected users are seeing relief as Microsoft continues to mitigate the impact.
Microsoft makes this clear in a chain of posts on X, sharing ongoing updates:
Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress. More details can be found within the admin center under MO821132 and on https://t.co/uSHwRmYdzx
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 19, 2024
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Microsoft Teams has suffered from a major outage this year.
In January, 14,500 incidents were reported by Downdetector in 90 minutes, as Teams users reported numerous challenges. These included difficulties logging in, missing messages, failed message loading, and delays in sending and receiving messages.
Overall, it took Microsoft 13 hours to address the issue completely. Fingers crossed, this time, it won’t take so long.
This news is unrelated to the Crowdstrike bug, which has impacted Windows devices. For more on that news, read our article: Much of the Digital World Goes Down, with One Faulty Cybersecurity Update Seemingly to Blame
