Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Microsoft services went down in some parts of the world yesterday, notably in India and parts of Asia. Among the services affected by the outage were Teams, Azure, Outlook and Microsoft 365, which all went down for a few hours.

In India alone, Downdetector, a site that keeps track of platform outages, received over 3,500 reports of disrupted services for Teams and another 3,000 outage issues for Outlook. Even Microsoft Azure, the firm’s public cloud platform, was reportedly disrupted, fueling speculation that the servers hosting these Microsoft services have been compromised.

As a result of the outage, users were unable to use the various Microsoft services affected. Some, for instance, were unable to use Microsoft 365, while others could neither send nor receive messages in Outlook. Others still could not join or participate in virtual meetings conducted via Teams.

Microsoft itself appears to have acknowledged the problem, tweeting yesterday about “issues impacting multiple 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

These issues seem to have been resolved as of posting, as said services are working and accessible already. Nevertheless, this outage, while evidently smaller in scale and addressed quite quickly, highlights how easily breakdowns in tech can disrupt work. It also shows why companies, especially those that offer remote or hybrid setups, cannot over-rely on one platform only.

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