Microsoft said it had retrieved all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure for more than four hours, as well as services used by millions around the world such as Teams and Outlook.
The issues began around 0705 UTC on January 25 and involved network connectivity issues for millions of Azure, Teams, and Outlook users when they attempted to connect to Azure resources, which naturally included Microsoft’s cloud-hosted services. Downdetector, a software outage tracking service, reported a spike in issues with Microsoft 365 apps (formerly known as Office 365) around 3 a.m. ET.
“We determined that a change made to the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN) impacted connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, connectivity between services within regions, as well as ExpressRoute connections,” the company said on its Azure cloud service site.
Thousands of users worldwide are unable to access Microsoft services such as Teams, Xbox Live, Outlook, and the Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft has acknowledged the outage and stated that it is working on a solution.
Microsof initially stated that the issue was due to “networking configuration issues,” but later stated that it had “rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact.” It updated its status report shortly after 7:30 a.m. ET to show that the applications were fully operational again. Microsoft has also stated that it will continue to monitor and investigate the problem.
The sources for this piece include articles in TheRegister and TechCrunch.