Microsoft Struggles as Software Bug Shuts down Teams, Azure, Outlook and other Office Tools

Microsoft has revealed that it was investigating a bug which has caused an outage its cloud-based office services – Teams, Azure, Outlook and other Office tools on a global scale.

At around 9.25 pm UTC, Microsoft reported authentication issues for its cloud services, meaning people had trouble signing into the online services; Teams, Outlook, and Office services globally were affected by the outage.

Microsoft in a recent Tweet stated:

We're investigating an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We're working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 28, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in increased usage of Microsoft’s cloud-based services. The tech giant recorded 75 million daily active users in the month of April

Although Microsoft has been able to restore its services,  a subset of customers in North America and the Asia Pacific are still unable to access them.

With the high-level of reliance on these cloud-services, Microsoft risks losing customers to competitors if this outage persists.

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What could have caused the outage?

The first pointer to the cause of the outbreak surface when Microsoft 365 made a status update on  Twitter stating that Microsoft had “identified a recent change that appears to be the cause of the issue,” and that this was being rolled back to curb the impact.

Shortly after, another tweet by Microsoft killed the momentum as it reported that Microsoft was “not seeing a rise in active links” as a result of the rollback.

Two hours later, Microsoft announced changes in multiple services after rerouting traffic to an alternative infrastructure. This brings wonder as to whether the Microsoft outage was due to a malicious attack which is taking the company time to fix, such that they had to resort to an alternative infrastructure.

However, Another status update from Microsoft pointed to “a specific portion of our infrastructure” that did not process authentication requests as anticipated.

We’ll continue to fill you in as the story develops.