Microsoft Teams Goes Down Amid Increased Usage

Microsoft’s team communication tool, Microsoft Teams, is experiencing a severe outage this morning here in Europe. Microsoft confirmed the problems on Twitter and says it’s actively investigating the problem.

It seems like most of the affected users are in Europe. The outage is most likely caused by the increased usage of the service, fueled by more people working from home and following their government guidance.

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Microsoft Teams being down right now is obviously not a good situation for anyone involved. Microsoft recently started giving away 6-months of paid features in Teams for free to help people work better remotely during the coronavirus outbreak. The increased usage has probably led to Microsoft scrambling to support all these new users and demand.

Microsoft has probably already started scaling up its servers to support the increased usage, so maybe these issues are unrelated. Xbox Live went down over the weekend, too.

However, people need services like Teams to just work at this time more than ever before. More companies and people are working remotely now, and Teams not working properly is not a good look for Microsoft’s flagship team communication tool.

Update: Microsoft has thankfully addressed the problem:

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Conversation 19 comments

  • MarkPow

    Premium Member
    16 March, 2020 - 7:24 am

    <p>Not that I really want this but they need to introduce a local Teams server that can be made highly available in a failover situation (and set in hybrid mode). </p><p><br></p><p>It is not acceptable for any business to be at the mercy of their cloud provider.</p>

    • scj123

      Premium Member
      16 March, 2020 - 8:08 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#531404">In reply to MarkPow:</a></em></blockquote><p>Surely your business has always been at the mercy of other companies, your at the mercy of your internet provider to make sure you are always connected, the same with your power provider to make sure you have electricity. But for some reason these seem to be acceptable.</p>

      • MarkPow

        Premium Member
        16 March, 2020 - 8:17 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#531413">In reply to scj123:</a></em></blockquote><p>Hi scj123, No, not really, we are ISO 22301 Business Continuity certified so all the Single Point of Failures (SPOFs) have been mitigated in some way (which is a fancy way of saying "two of everything!")</p>

        • scj123

          Premium Member
          16 March, 2020 - 8:24 am

          <blockquote><em><a href="#531416">In reply to MarkPow:</a></em></blockquote><p>Which makes cloud based products an unacceptable option to your business, not any business. Many business believe the benefit massively out ways the risk.</p>

          • MarkPow

            Premium Member
            16 March, 2020 - 8:42 am

            <blockquote><em><a href="#531419">In reply to scj123:</a></em></blockquote><p>Hmm, well, I don't believe "many businesses" have done a proper Risk Assessment on the basis that there is potential for the whole company to come to a halt for an indeterminable amount of time. And no, "we have an SLA" is not going to cut it.</p>

            • lvthunder

              Premium Member
              16 March, 2020 - 10:57 am

              <blockquote><em><a href="#531422">In reply to MarkPow:</a></em></blockquote><p>Just because you can't chat with someone you have to send them an email or call them on the phone doesn't mean your company has come to a halt.</p>

              • MarkPow

                Premium Member
                16 March, 2020 - 12:09 pm

                <blockquote><em><a href="#531478">In reply to lvthunder:</a></em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>Indeed, in regards to Teams, but if you've migrated all your business critical functions to the cloud, and the cloud goes down, then all you'll hear in the office is twiddling thumbs.</p>

    • darkgrayknight

      Premium Member
      16 March, 2020 - 10:59 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#531404">In reply to MarkPow:</a></em></blockquote><p>We had a city wide power outage Sunday midnight to late afternoon. We're all the mercy of other companies.</p>

      • MarkPow

        Premium Member
        16 March, 2020 - 12:11 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#531479">In reply to darkgrayknight:</a></em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>Not really; electricity SPOFs are mitigated by generators and UPSs.</p>

        • gelfer

          Premium Member
          19 March, 2020 - 4:18 am

          <blockquote><em><a href="#531505">In reply to MarkPow:</a></em></blockquote><p>Which in turn are dependant on how much fuel you got in the tank and/or how fast external supplier can deliver. I've had UPS's fail because of electronics too (one week a big test, all ok, next week power failure and UPS gives up after 10 seconds). Even had failure of starting the generator after just 1 phase was out, because the monitoring was only on the 2 other phases. You just can't make this stuff up…but it happened to us!</p>

  • arnstarr

    16 March, 2020 - 7:42 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(50, 49, 48);">Start time: Monday, March 16, 2020, 3:30 AM (3/15/2020, 8:30 PM UTC)</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(50, 49, 48);">End time: Monday, March 16, 2020, 4:51 AM (3/15/2020, 9:51 PM UTC)</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(50, 49, 48);">Root cause: An upstream power outage resulted in impact for multiple Microsoft 365 services.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(50, 49, 48);">Next steps:</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(50, 49, 48);">- We're working to identify the cause of the power outage to find ways to prevent this problem from happening again.</span></p>

    • mark-swiss

      16 March, 2020 - 10:16 am

      <blockquote><a href="#531411"><em>In reply to arnstarr:</em></a><em> Thank you for feedback and your excellent work!</em></blockquote><p><br></p>

  • jules_wombat

    16 March, 2020 - 8:20 am

    <p>This is pretty embarrassing when we are told the future is all cloud and Azure services. Just when we all need it, Microsoft lets us down. At least Skype is holding up.</p>

  • plm

    16 March, 2020 - 10:21 am

    <p>Is there any evidence that usage has increased because of COVID-19? Or has usage moved from office to home?</p><p><br></p><p>At this point I'd suggest there is little evidence that this is a scale problem related to increase usage. If I had to make an uninformed guess<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">, I'd say the outage is caused by some other issue. More along the lines of the Xbox outage.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I urge you to adopt a standard that your reporting be based on facts not speculation. Especially at times like this, your readers need to have actionable news. Speculation can actually do more harm at times than good.</span></p>

    • sandy

      16 March, 2020 - 8:30 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#531454">In reply to plm:</a></em></blockquote><p>Aren't you just speculating by suggesting it is not related to COVID-19?</p><p><br></p><p>France is now in full lockdown, as Spain &amp; Italy already were, and the outage starting in the morning (CET) it's reasonable to suspect that the increased load due to people using the service more.</p><p>Plus Xbox Live going down may also have been due to increased usage, with more people stuck at home due to the pandemic.</p>

      • plm

        17 March, 2020 - 9:50 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#531610">In reply to Sandy:</a></em></blockquote><h5>See standard comment from <a href="https://www.thurrott.com/users/arnstarr&quot; target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 110, 206);">arnstarr</a>. It was apparently a power outage.</h5><p><br></p>

  • crp0908

    17 March, 2020 - 8:55 am

    <blockquote><em><a href="#531436">In reply to RM:</a></em></blockquote><p>If cloud wasn't Microsoft's main focus and a significant source of Microsoft's income, I would tend to agree with you. However, Microsoft likes to give the impression that their resources are infinite. Their mantra is 'cloud first' so their priorities should be 'cloud first.'&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>In their gesture of temporarily giving Teams away for free, they managed to underestimate demand or overestimate capacity and they adversely impacted their paying customers. Someone made a miscalculation that resulted in a bad decision. So yes, Microsoft should be embarrassed.</p>

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