Microsoft Teams Experiences a Worldwide Outage

On Friday, Microsoft acknowledged and began remediating a massive Teams outage that impacted customers worldwide. As of this writing on Saturday morning, the issues appear to be resolved.

“We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features,” Microsoft revealed Friday morning on Twitter. Two hours later, it reported that it had seen some improvements in the EMEA after completing failover efforts. But after similar work in North and South America didn’t immediately solve the issues there, it continued its network and backend service optimization efforts and was believed that it was “effectively reducing the impact to customers.” And while Teams was still not fully online or functional worldwide, by Friday evening, Microsoft reported that it had seen “significant improvements or full remediation in many of the Teams features affected by this incident.”

It’s not clear what happened—Microsoft at one point blamed a “networking issue” that impacted backend databases—but Teams users reported multiple issues throughout Friday impacting their ability to read or otherwise access messages, media, call recordings, bots, read receipt notifications, captions, reports, and many other Teams features.

Looking at Microsoft’s Service Health website this morning, I see no issues with the company’s consumer services. The service health page in the Microsoft 365 admin console for commercial customers is another story entirely: There, I can still see a laundry list of issues that Microsoft says it is still working on. (I may only be seeing results for the U.S.)

But this morning, Microsoft said that it had solved the problem.

“After extended monitoring and various optimizations and mitigation efforts, we’ve confirmed that our Microsoft Teams service and features have been restored or have returned to optimal health,” it tweeted.