Microsoft Teams, Office 365 users hit by global outage that lasted at least seven hours

SINGAPORE – A worldwide outage that lasted at least 7 hours strike consumers of Microsoft’s Groups communications system and Business office 365 suite of apps on Thursday (July 21).

Quite a few buyers all-around the earth, including in the United States, Singapore and Japan, were being not able to talk with fellow colleagues from as early as 9am. Lots of switched to other conferencing and productivity apps to keep away from small business disruptions.

At all around 4pm, Microsoft said on Twitter that most options had been restored. 

Its general public update about the disruption went out at 9.47am, stating it experienced received experiences of people being not able to accessibility Teams or use any of its options and was investigating the concern.

Downdetector.com, which tracks outages by collating status reviews and consumer-submitted problems, documented a peak of far more than 3,200 influenced users in Singapore at 9.49am.

Countless numbers had been influenced in other international locations close to the identical time, which include a lot more than 4,800 in the US and in excess of 18,200 in Japan.

Ms Sarah Ng, a Singaporean manager who is effective for a US-dependent non-gain organisation in Singapore, reported she identified herself not able to deliver messages on Microsoft Teams around 9.30am.

“I considered there was anything wrong with my Wi-Fi community, so I restarted my router and modem, and also experimented with to use cellular info tethering,” she mentioned. “But I realised that other web sites were being operating and it was just Microsoft Teams.”

Ms Ng, 27, added that she was also owning difficulties accessing her do the job documents on Microsoft SharePoint and enhancing them on the browser-primarily based Place of work 365 model of Microsoft Word.

A Singaporean attorney in a substantial international regulation agency reported her workplace experienced to swap to Cisco’s Webex video clip-conferencing system and cell phone calls as a substitute of Teams.

“I acquired an real cellphone contact that wasn’t a scam contact for the first time in months. It was an inner connect with that would’ve ordinarily been on Groups,” mentioned the lawyer, who declined to be named.

Mr Leon Chao, 29, who is effective at nearby online grocery store Greater Bites, said he was unable to share files or sync updates on the cloud variation of Microsoft Excel, which the corporation makes use of to handle and update products costs.

Not being in a position to sync information to Microsoft OneDrive meant that only just one human being could do the job on the info at a time. Multiple variations of files have been also created, with distinctions amongst the copies on the company’s computers and in the cloud.

“It was a mess. There was a perception of worry, specifically early in the morning when nobody knew what was going on, and uncertainty about no matter whether critical details and info were being overwritten or outdated,” Mr Chao stated.

He additional that his staff would work on the knowledge offline and not use the cloud edition for the duration of the disruption.

At 11.02am, Microsoft stated it had established that the outage was thanks to a latest deployment – or roll-out of an app or attribute – which contained a “broken connection to an internal storage service”.

“We’re functioning to immediate website traffic to a nutritious company to mitigate effect,” Microsoft extra.

It later on acknowledged that other products and services connected to Groups have been also afflicted, like Microsoft Word, Office environment On the internet and SharePoint On the internet.