Microsoft Teams and Azure services recovering from worldwide outage
Since 1:10 am IST, several users around the world were unable to access Microsoft Teams, Azure, and few other Microsoft services. According to initial reports from Microsoft, the primary impact is on Microsoft Teams. The company is attempting to restore the affected services, although a reversal of the changes that caused the outage is taking longer than what the tech giant had initially expected.
Company claims change to Microsoft 365 authentication system caused outage
The company explained that a recent change to the Microsoft 365 authentication system has caused the outage. Users from around the world took to Twitter saying that they were unable to use Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 services including the Service Health dashboard. Microsoft said any service that utilizes Azure Active Directory may be affected.
Microsoft says outage may impact users of related services too
Citing the problem with the Azure Active Directory, the company said the outage may be experienced by users of Microsoft Teams, Forms, Exchange Online, Intune, and Yammer. A heatmap (pictured) on outage-tracking website Downdetector shows that the Microsoft Teams issue affected users from major cities in the US and Canada, including Washington, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Recent Hafnium breach could've forced Microsoft to overhaul authentication system
The tech giant admitted that a change to authentication systems caused the outage. Just last week, Microsoft's business email service was hacked by a Chinese group dubbed Hafnium. This leads us to believe that the authentication system was being overhauled because the current system had been compromised. The cyberattack claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and drew concerns from even the White House.
Clients weren't able to log on to Microsoft console either
Notably, this is the third time since February that major issues have affected a large number of clients. An anonymous IT director told CRN that it was not even possible to log in to the Microsoft console to see what was going on. The IT director went on to speculate that the rapid growth of Microsoft Teams may have led to the problems.
Latest update says most of the affected services have recovered
As on October last year, Microsoft Teams had 115 million daily active users. It's safe to assume the number has grown since then. An outage of these proportions dents Microsoft's brand value and disrupts day-to-day operations for Azure clients around the world. Microsoft's latest tweet says a majority of the services have recovered, but some are still experiencing residual impact and recovery delays.
