Outlook, Teams, Xbox news – latest: Microsoft investigating as mass outage continues

An update to Microsoft’s server status page suggests – very tentatively – that the problem might be gradually getting fixed. It reads:

“We’ve identified that a wide-area networking (WAN) routing change caused impact to the service. We’ve rolled back the change and monitoring the service as it recovers. Some of the customers who had previously reported impact are also reporting recovery.”

You too might find that affected services are starting to work.

Microsoft has updated its server status page to make the update a little more clean. But there’s no news: it is still saying that it thinks it has found the problem but is looking for a way to fix it without causing new ones.

Here’s the latest on where we are, via Reuters:

Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday it was investigating a networking issue that impacted multiple services including Teams and Outlook, with outage reports saying the platforms were down for thousands of users globally.

Microsoft did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 3,900 incidents in India and over 900 in Japan. Outage reports also spiked in Australia, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

The Downdetector site tracks outages by collating status reports from sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

“We’ve identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps,” Microsoft said in a tweet.

Microsoft‘s cloud unit Azure also tweeted about the networking issue, and said that a subset of users were experiencing problems with the platform.

During the outage, most users were unable to exchange messages, join calls or use any features of Teams application. Many users took to Twitter to share updates about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.

Microsoft Teams, used by more than 280 million people globally, forms an integral part of daily operations for businesses and schools, which use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organize their workflow.

Among the other services affected were Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, according to the company’s status page.

Microsoft now says that it has “isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue, and we are analyzing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing additional impact.”

The same update also makes clear how widespread it is. “Impact is occurring to the following services but is not limited to them: -Microsoft Teams -Exchange Online -Outlook -SharePoint Online -OneDrive for Business -Microsoft Graph -PowerBi – Microsoft 365 Admin Center”

The latest from Microsoft is that has “identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps”.

That update comes from the Microsoft 365 account. Though the issue is widespread, Microsoft tends to track and communicate outages from the accounts devoted to individual products.

But it is probably safe to assume the cause of the problem is the same across different products, since they all started at the same time.

… to The Independent’s live coverage of an ongoing outage at Microsoft.