Microsoft Azure Outage: Services Mostly Restored But Some Users May Still Encounter Issues

People who are using Microsoft services that are depending on its Azure platform experienced a massive outage around Monday afternoon. It took some time before the company’s technicians were able to finally restore connectivity but it looks like some isolated issues continue to plague a number of users.

Among those affected are Xbox Live, Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. According to a report from Windows Central, the downtime was reported by users from all over the world. Those who attempted to access the aforementioned services at the time encountered error messages and limited functionalities.

A tweet from Microsoft 365 Status said that the Azure server outage had been caused by "a recent change to an authentication system." The solution they came up with was to roll back the software to the previous version which would have taken approximately 15 minutes.

This process apparently took a little longer than expected but it eventually tweeted, "We are currently rolling out a mitigation worldwide. Customers should begin seeing recovery at this time, and we anticipate full remediation within 60 minutes."

The last time the developers acknowledged a major outage was in September last year. What was affected were services dependent on its Azure cloud computing framework, such as Microsoft Teams, Office 365 and Outlook. Interestingly, it was also caused by a configuration change, reported The Verge.

The publication then went on to list some of the services and the respective issues that could surface until Microsoft announces that its services are restored. Microsoft Teams users may notice desktop app launch issues or message delivery delays. Those accessing Intune will encounter general service degradation.

Meanwhile, both Microsoft Forms and Outlook are tagged with, "We're working on confirm [sic] mitigation." So far, Yammer has been flagged to be up and running.

Upon checking the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account, the latest message read, "We've confirmed impact has been largely mitigated and we'll continue to provide service-specific updates via http://status.office.com and under MO244568 in the admin center."

Data shows that there are about 115 million people who are using Microsoft Teams. Amid the pandemic, the business and education sectors have shifted to online-only to comply with the safety protocols issued by public health officials. Outages similar to this immediately impact users who rely on it for communication and productivity.