Teams, Outlook, Azure Public – Everything Was Down
Services of Microsoft came to a standstill on 25th January Wednesday with Teams, Outlook, Microsoft Store, and Microsoft 365 remaining unresponsive for almost three hours. The outage detecting website – DownDetector informed that it got around 3000 outage reports for each of the services mentioned. As of writing this article (GMT 10.20 am), the graph on the DownDetector website hasn’t gone back to the baseline of zero.
Reason For The Outage
Microsoft, in an official announcement, said that a change in the routing of Wide Area Networking has caused the outage. The company has already reversed the change and services have started getting restored to normal.
Apart from its core services that we mentioned, users of SharePoint Online, OneDrive, PowerBI, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Identity and Endpoint, etc have also been affected. Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform has also been affected as far as the public cloud is concerned.
The American multinational tech giant announced on Twitter that it had rolled back the network change. The services were expected to come back up soon.
Businesses Impacted
Services like Teams, MS Exchange mail server, Outlook, and, of course, Azure public cloud are used by thousands of businesses to power their internal business processes. The outage has thus severely impacted the productivity of businesses. From dropping out of meetings to not being able to access Outlook – business users across the world have been complaining on Twitter for 3 hours. Such degradation of services leads to the loss of wealth for businesses.
Twitter Banter and Conspiracy Theories Regarding The Outage
As is the tradition, an outage of the services provided by any big corporation leads to memes and banter on Twitter. One user wrote that she was packing her bags and running to the airport (as productivity was affected). Another user, in an ironic tone, wrote “Happy Wednesday.”
However, some users pointed out that the disruption of cloud services reminds us that when it comes to the cloud, users can’t do anything when something bad happens.
Some conspiracy theories were floating on the internet as well. Some users tried to connect the outage with the recent layoff of 10,000 people at Microsoft.
Services Being Restored
As per the data from DownDetector, the number of outage incidents has climbed down from the peak and is coming down rapidly. Users have already started reporting that services are coming back to as they were before the outage. The remaining issues will be resolved soon.