Microsoft Faces Another Outage, Disrupting Teams and Outlook Services Globally

Microsoft Faces Another Outage: In yet another technical failure, Microsoft on Monday suffered its second outage in two weeks, halting critical services such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive. It began at around 2:34 PM and led to an interruption to global outages and stranded thousands of users without any access to their tools for hours.

Microsoft Faces Another Outage: Global Impact, Indian Users Hit Early

The problem, first indicated on Downdetector began to pick up complaints sharply at 6:19 PM. Reports from The Times of India (TOI) said Indian users saw problems around 3:19 PM IST, which proved that it was a multi-regional issue. Many users said they were unable to access the Teams calendar tool, an essential feature for calendars and other collaborative applications.

Microsoft Response: Updates and workaround

Acknowledging the situation, Microsoft 365 Status confirmed they were investigating the root cause. “We’re reviewing service monitoring telemetry to isolate the source of the problem and develop a remediation plan,” the company stated. To mitigate the inconvenience, Microsoft suggested users access applications and documents via desktop versions while the web-based services remained unstable.

We’re investigating an issue where some users may be unable to access Microsoft 365 apps for the web. We're reviewing service monitoring telemetry to isolate the root cause and develop a remediation plan. For more information, please refer to OO953223 in the admin center.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) December 10, 2024

The status update also referenced issue ID OO953223 in the admin centre, for real-time information, advising people to stay tuned for updates. Despite all this, many users remain down due to the company’s ongoing work towards full recovery.

Uncertainty Looms Over Full Recovery

As Microsoft examines the full extent of the outage, no timeline for resolving the issue has been given. That leaves thousands of users-including businesses and individuals-morally suspended in their wait for further news.

Repeated Disruptions Raise Concerns

This is the second major outage in a fortnight, and it raises questions about the reliability of Microsoft’s cloud-based services. The more frequent such disruptions are, the more challenging it becomes for organizations that rely on Microsoft 365 for their day-to-day operations.

At present, Microsoft has advised checking the admin centre for further updates. However, with millions depending on its services worldwide, the tech giant is faced with ever-mounting pressure to ensure that service stability is not interrupted and such incidents don’t happen again in the future.