Microsoft resolves service outage affecting Teams and Exchange Online
Several Microsoft 365 services were down for hours
Microsoft says an outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Teams and Exchange Online services, has been resolved.
This comes after customers complained for several hours that they were unable to access the services.
In a series of tweets published on Tuesday, Microsoft said that rerouting traffic and restarting targeted infrastructure helped effectively restore service access and functioning.
The disruption began on Monday, June 20, around 11:00 PM UTC/GMT, with multiple users experiencing and reporting being prompted to re-login, emails becoming stuck in queues, and not getting delivered.
Others reported that no matter whatever connection option they used, they were unable to get access to their Exchange Online mailboxes.
The Exchange Online hosted email platform for enterprises and the Microsoft Teams collaboration tool were among the services that were impacted, along with SharePoint Online, the Graph API and Universal Print.
The Redmond behemoth confirmed on Twitter that the outage had impacted several Microsoft 365 services, making it impossible for customers to access their Exchange Online mails.
The firm said that it was looking into the issue and noted that certain Outlook customers "may be unable to access their mailboxes via any connection method" and could experience delays sending, receiving or accessing email messages.
Some customers in Asia and the Middle East were impacted by the Microsoft 365 outage, although the issue seemed to be considerably more widespread in Europe and North America.
Microsoft advised IT administrators to monitor the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for updates.
The problem was tracked as EX394347 and MO394389.
"We've identified that our traffic management infrastructure is not working as expected," Microsoft said.
It later revealed that it was routing traffic to a different, healthy traffic management infrastructure in order to lessen the effect of the problem while still looking into its root causes.
After rerouting the traffic, the firm claimed to have seen an increase in service availability.
This is not the first time that Microsoft 365 services have had problems.
In October 2020, Microsoft 365 suffered a major outage, affecting users in several regions of the United States. The issue prevented customers from accessing multiple Office 365 services and Outlook mail, with users complaining about receiving 'Something went wrong' error messages when they tried to access their Microsoft 365 accounts.
In September 2020, a major outage affected users' access to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Office and Outlook, in several countries, including the US. The company blamed a change in the software for the issue.
The latest Microsoft outage coincides with the wide-ranging service outage affecting Cloudflare on Tuesday, which brought down hundreds of well-known online platforms and services.
Accessibility issues were reported by users on a number of services, including Amazon, Discord, Telegram, Coinbase, Twitch, Steam, DoorDash and more.
The problem, according to a blog post by Cloudflare, impacted 19 data centres that handle a significant amount of the company's traffic.