Microsoft 365 Restored After Outage

Microsoft has resolved issues that left thousands of people unable to access Microsoft 365 services, including Teams.

According to the Downdetector website, users experienced outages on Thursday, with another slew of reports of problems hours later on the same day.

Outages with cloud services are nothing new. In September last year for example, Microsoft suffered a three hour outage of its cloud-based offices services, that impacted Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Office.

Microsoft 365

This week’s problem has been mitigated according to Redmond, which impacted Microsoft 365 services and features, including workplace messaging app Teams and Azure.

“We’re investigating an issue in which users may be unable to access Microsoft 365 services and features. We’ll provide additional information as soon as possible,” Redmond tweeted on Thursday.

“We’re investigating a potential DNS issue and are evaluating our mitigation options,” it later tweeted.

“Microsoft rerouted traffic to our resilient DNS capabilities and are seeing improvement in service availability,” it tweeted later. “We are continuing to investigate the cause of the DNS issue. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes or as events warrant.”

Domain Name System (DNS) is essentially an address book of the internet which enables computers to match website addresses with the correct server.

Some users took to Twitter to question why Microsoft used an unverified account (Microsoft 365 Status) to inform system administrators around the world of the problem.

Some suggested that Microsoft should use an account with a blue tick to indicate it is a verified corporate account.