Worldwide Microsoft Teams Outage Update: Platform ‘Performing As Expected’

“We’ve monitored the environment and confirmed that the service is performing as expected,” said Microsoft in a twitter post on Tuesday at 9:03 am. “If a user is still experiencing impact, they need to restart their clients to recover.”

Microsoft says its Teams videoconferencing and collaboration platform is now “performing as expected” after a global outage that impacted users on Tuesday morning.

“We’ve monitored the environment and confirmed that the service is performing as expected,” said Microsoft in a twitter post on Tuesday at 9:03 am. “If a user is still experiencing impact, they need to restart their clients to recover.”

Microsoft confirmed the global outage in a 6:53 am post: “We’ve confirmed that this issue affects users globally. We’re reviewing monitoring telemetry and recent changes to isolate the source of the issue.”

The Microsoft Team outage comes after the cloud behemoth apologized for a March 15 worldwide outage that impacted Azure cloud services including Microsoft Teams, Office 365 and Dynamics 365.

[RELATED: Microsoft Teams Updates Add ’Sorely Missing’ Features: Partners]

Microsoft also experienced an Azure, Teams and Office 365 outage on April 2 related to DNS issues.

A CIO, who did not want to be identified, said he suspects the issue is a result of Microsoft grappling with the phenomenal rapid growth of Teams even as it adds new features at a blistering pace.

“I think Microsoft is growing so fast in terms of feature set and users that they are having trouble keeping up with it,” he said. “They are pushing features out really fast and I think they are running into change management issues. They are growing really fast.”

The CIO said he gives Microsoft credit for pushing the envelope to deliver new Teams features. “Microsoft is being very aggressive and proactive and adding features that the community needs,” he said. “I really appreciate that. I just wish they had more change control measures.”

Bob Venero, CEO of Holbrook, N.Y.-based solution provider Future Tech, No. 96 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2020, said he is not surprised by the outage given the rapid growth of Teams.

“As platforms like Teams grow bigger and bigger you are going to have more and more outages and those outages are going to have greater and greater impact as more and more individuals utilize solutions like this,” he said. “It is the nature of the beast. Systems go down. You can have the most advanced solution and system and something will go wrong whether it is human error, system error, or a cyber-attack. There are so many different vectors for an outage. And the bigger the platform the more impact the outage has on users.”

Future Tech, for its part, works proactively with all its customers to put in place “redundancy” to prevent outages, said Venero. That said, he cautioned, such measures are costly for businesses. “We are always working with our customer to ensure resiliency in the solutions they are utilizing both in public cloud and on premise,” he said.