For workplaces that make use of it, Microsoft Teams is undoubtedly an important tool. Which makes for a bad time if the service ever gets disrupted. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened this morning.
Via the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account, the company says that it has “received reports of users being unable to access Microsoft Teams or leverage any features”. The company did not disclose the number of users affected, but according to outage tracking website Downdetector, over 4800 users have reported having issues accessing the service as recently as 10AM. Perhaps tangentially related is the fact that Office 365 also had its service disrupted for over 200 users at around the same time.
We've received reports of users being unable to access Microsoft Teams or leverage any features. We're investigating the issue and further updates can be found in your Service Health Dashboard via TM402718.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 21, 2022
As shared by one affected user, the Microsoft Teams desktop app may sign in successfully, but all functionalities within it may not work. Users are instead greeted with the “We ran into a problem. Reconnecting…” message. On the web client, users will instead see the “Operation failed with unexpected error” message. Microsoft would then share this as well as new reports coming in have claimed that users are also unable to access the admin centre to view updates.
Someones Major Incident Management SLAs should be ringing. Its 3:07 local time and no update at 3:00 as indicated. pic.twitter.com/iC8eUsT1ST
— BFG – Bearded Funny Guy (@JockTheKiwi) July 21, 2022
About an hour after the initial reports, Microsoft says that it has determined the cause of the issue. As per the tweet, the company says that “a recent deployment contained a broken connection to an internal storage service”. The company also says that it is working to “direct traffic to a healthy service to mitigate impact”.
Some users have reported that they are unable to access the admin center to view updates. Please navigate to https://t.co/AEUj8uAGXl for additional information.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 21, 2022
Overall, this looks to be a similar incident to what happened back in September of 2020 for Microsoft 365. Though this time it looks to be a more severe outage, as features are completely unavailable whereas previously, users could still continue using Microsoft Teams for as long as their authentication token does not expire.
(Source: Microsoft [1], [2], [3], Downdetector [1], [2])
