Microsoft Teams outage affects thousands of users

Thousands of Microsoft Teams users flocked to social media to complain on Friday after the platform went down without warning mid-afternoon.

Problems were also reported issues with the entire Microsoft 365 system, as well as reports of problems connecting to the Microsoft Store, according to Downdetector.com.

The problems for the collaboration Team app started about just before 11 a.m. EST. and were still being reported by Microsoft at 4 p.m. EST, the end of the work day.

Downdetector’s online outage tracker showed that at its peak (1:54 p.m. EST), about 14,500 users in the US were reporting issues with the workplace collaboration and video conferencing app.

"Severe delays in teams chat and channels between all our regions west and east US. The chaos of replies that are out of order is pretty good Friday entertainment tho..," profile user @RDSitze commented on X.

"It seemed to improve about 40 minutes ago, but is now much much worse," @RDSitze said.

Users in Canada and the UK also reported issues with Teams, as well as a few thousand users in South America, the majority in Brazil.

Well over 50% of all three Microsoft products users complained of problems with the applications themselves, some with Outlook, and others with server connections.

Microsoft’s 365 app, which Teams is a part of, launched an investigation, announcing they figured out what had happened and were fixing the issue just a few hours into the outage.

“We've identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service, and we're performing a failover to remediate impact. Additional information can be found under TM710344 in the admin center,” Microsoft 365 posted on X.

At about 1:30 p.m. EST, Microsoft posted on X that it had "completed the failover in the EMEA region and service telemetry is showing some improvement," but in a later statement, admitted that users in the Americas were still having issues about 2 hours later.

"Our failover operation did not provide immediate relief to all end users in North and South America regions. However, we’re seeing improvements as we continue to optimize traffic patterns and apply configuration changes intended to reduce customer impact as quickly as possible," Microsoft's latest update stated.

As of 2023, Microsoft Teams has 320 million users, according to the company's own reported statistics.