Microsoft says it is looking into an outage that prevented thousands of Indian users from accessing Outlook and Teams services.
Microsoft had a networking outage on Wednesday, affecting its cloud platform Azure and applications such as Teams and Outlook, potentially affecting millions of customers worldwide.
According to Azure’s status page, services were affected in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. Only services in China and its official forum were spared.
Because practically all of the world’s major corporations use Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, an outage can affect a wide range of services and have a domino effect.
“We have detected a network connectivity issue affecting devices throughout the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN),” Microsoft explained. According to the company, this affects communication between customers over the Internet and connectivity between services in Azure and data centers.
Microsoft noted in a tweet that it has reversed a network update that it suspected was causing the problem. “We are monitoring service while the reversal takes effect,” the company said.
Microsoft did not say how many customers were affected by the outage, but data from the outage tracking website Downdetector showed hundreds of incidents spread across continents.
The DownDetector website monitors outages by compiling status information from multiple sources, including user-submitted faults on its platform.
Outages of Big Tech platforms are rare, with service outages affecting organizations ranging from Google to Meta. Last year, Azure, the second largest cloud service provider after Amazon, experienced difficulties.
However, with more people working from home over the past three years due to increased reliance on online platforms, the impact of each interruption is greater.
During downtime, users had difficulty exchanging messages, joining calls, or using the capabilities of any Teams application. Several customers took to Twitter to report the service outage, with the hashtag #MicrosoftTeams trending.
Microsoft Teams, used by more than 280 million people worldwide, is an essential element of daily operations for companies and schools that use it to make calls, arrange meetings, and streamline their workflows.
Additional services affected include Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, according to the company’s status website.