After an hours-long outage that affected the chat program for thousands of users, Microsoft Corp. announced on Thursday (July 21) that MS Teams was operational again for some users.
The Redmond, Washington-based business attributed the outage to "a recent deployment that contained a broken connection to an internal storage service," although it did not specify how many people were impacted.
"We're receiving many reports that users are able to access Microsoft Teams, and many functions are beginning to recover," the company said.
The use of MS Teams by employees to connect internally, message one another, place calls, and organize their workflow makes it a crucial component of business operations every day.
According to Downdetector.com, which analyzes outages by compiling status updates from sources including user-submitted faults on its platform, there were more than 4,800 cases of customers reporting problems with Microsoft Teams on Wednesday.
Downdetector, said 530 users are now having issues as of 12.15 a.m. ET (12.15 p.m. Singapore time). Additionally, the site monitoring company previously revealed that there were over 150 instances of users reporting problems with Microsoft Office 365.
Microsoft tweeted that it had determined the downstream effects of Teams integration on a number of Microsoft 365 services, including Microsoft Word, Office Online, and SharePoint Online. "We've taken action to reroute a portion of traffic to provide some relief within the environment," it said.
As the demand for remote business-oriented teleconferencing and messaging solutions surged and became a crucial fixture for organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic as people worked from homes, Microsoft stated in its earnings call in January that Teams had topped 270 million monthly active users.
The Microsoft 365 family of products includes the proprietary business communication platform known as Microsoft Teams. Teams offers workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration, primarily competing with the similar service Slack. It is considered one of the best messaging app for businesses, offering a place for meetings, real-time collaboration, file and app sharing, and even the occasional emoji! Everything is centralized, visible, and open to all.
A nearly six-hour long outage at Meta Platforms in October prevented millions of users from accessing WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, among other major digital companies that have also had outages in the past year.
A Domain Name System (DNS) malfunction was held responsible for that outage. A DNS connects domain names to the right IP addresses so that people can access websites.
