Teams, Outlook Have ‘Recovered’ From Microsoft 365 Outage
‘No one likes to hear about outages, but I give Microsoft kudos because when these things happen they seem to be one of the fastest companies to recover and get back online,’ says US itek founder and President David Stinner.
Microsoft Wednesday morning said it has recovered from an outage that impacted multiple Microsoft 365 services including Teams and Outlook in North America.
“We’ve confirmed that the impacted services have recovered and remain stable,” said the software giant in Twitter post at about 9:30 a.m. EST.
In a post on the Azure status history site, Microsoft said “a change made to the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN) impacted connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, connectivity between services within regions, as well as ExpressRoute connections.”
As a result of the Wide Area Network change, Microsoft said customers “experienced issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources in Public Azure regions, as well as other Microsoft services” including Microsoft 365 and PowerBI enterprise business intelligence platform.
We've confirmed that the impacted services have recovered and remain stable. We're investigating some potential impact to the Exchange Online Service. Further, updates on the Exchange investigation will be available in your admin center under the SI# EX502694.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) January 25, 2023
[Releated: Microsoft Hit With Teams, Microsoft 365 Outage Issues]
Microsoft said it is still investigating the impact of the outage on Exchange online issues.
The latest outage came in the early hours Wednesday morning with Microsoft reporting in a Twitter post that it was “investigating an issue where some users in North America are unable to access Microsoft 365 services.”
We're investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services. More info can be found in the admin center under MO502273.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) January 25, 2023
The outage impacted thousands of users running Microsoft Teams, and Outlook Down Detector, which
monitors outages on cloud services, reported a big uptick in Microsoft 365 issues at about 3 a.m. EST.
Microsoft said at the time that it was “analyzing network trace logs to isolate the source of the issue.”
At about 3:44 a.m. EST, Microsoft said in a Twitter post it had “identified a potential networking issue” and was reviewing “telemetry” to determine next steps. At about 4:44 a.m. EST, Microsoft said it “rolled back a network change” that it believed was impacting service.
Finally at about 5:44 a.m. EST, Microsoft said it was “continuing to monitor the recovery across the service,” with some customers reporting “mitigation.”
As part of the recovery effort, Microsoft connected the 365 service to “additional infrastructure.”
Second Microsoft Outage In A Week
The outage comes just one week after thousands of North America users were impacted by a Teams and Microsoft 365 outage. In that outage on Jan. 17, Microsoft was forced to analyze “network trace logs” to isolate the source of the issue, which left some users in North America “unable to access Microsoft 365 services.”
CRN reached out to Microsoft on whether the latest outage was in any way related to the Jan. 17 incident but had not heard back at press time.
David Stinner, founder and president of US itek, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based MSP, said he is not concerned about the outages given Microsoft’s ability to recover quickly.
“No one likes to hear about outages, but I give Microsoft kudos because when these things happen they seem to be one of the fastest companies to recover and get back online,” he said. “For some SaaS providers, outages can last many hours and even as long as a day. I don’t think it was that widespread. US itek and none of our customers were impacted.”
Stinner credited Microsoft with having the best online telemetry and cybersecurity of any of the hyperscaler providers. “Microsoft is on top of the world with the best cybersecurity and telemetry and online experience than any other company out there,” he said. “Their ability to bring these Microsoft 365 services back online quickly is a testament to the fact that they are the best in the business at keeping cloud services up and running and safe. I’m all in with Microsoft Azure and its complete cybersecurity stack. No one else is gathering as much cloud data with their telemetry than Microsoft. That puts my mind at ease.”