The workplace messaging application temporarily went offline on Thursday, sparking an investigation by Microsoft.
Business communication platform Microsoft Teams encountered an hours-long outage on Thursday that interrupted daily operations for thousands across the world.
Users who utilize the platform to communicate with colleagues internally, send messages, make calls, and organize workflows were forced to halt these activities due to the service interruption.
According to Reuters, Microsoft identified a disruption "on a recent deployment that contained a broken connection to an internal storage service" but did not specify how many users were affected by the outage.
On Wednesday, there were over 4,800 incidents of users who reported issues with Microsoft Teams, as per Down Detector, which tracks service outages by collecting status reports submitted by users on its platform.
The web monitoring company also reported over 150 incidents of users reporting issues with Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft confirmed on Twitter that it identified downstream impact to several Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration, such as Microsoft Word, Office Online, and SharePoint Online. They reported that they have "taken action to reroute a portion of traffic to provide some relief within the environment."
How Did the Microsoft Teams Global Outage Affect Users?
Around the world, thousands of offices and their employees hit a pause on productivity after the Microsoft Teams platform experienced a global outage. Employees were forced to look for alternatives during the hours that the crucial online workspace went offline.
An employee from one of Australia's largest banks told the Daily Mail that the entire office had gone home when Microsoft Teams stopped working. Many users who were affected by the global outage immediately took to Twitter to make light of an otherwise inconvenient situation.
One user wrote, "So Microsoft Teams just went down... I guess it's time for me to clock out." Others observed that the timing of the global outage provided employees with unexpected yet welcome downtime.
Microsoft Teams saw massive growth in the number of its users amidst the COVID pandemic, which resulted in a need for remote business-oriented teleconferencing and messaging tools. During its earnings call in January, Microsoft said that Teams had surpassed 270 million monthly active users.
Big Tech Giant Adding More Innovations to Microsoft Teams
Before Microsoft Teams encountered a global outage this week, the company published a new blog post detailing three new goals that shaped the new features being brought into the productivity platform. Such goals were to "[enable] hybrid work," "[bring] collaborative experiences into the flow of work," and "[create] the digital employee experience."
Thus, Microsoft is introducing Excel Live, which will let users collaborate in real-time on workbooks in Teams meetings. This new feature transforms the Microsoft Teams meeting window into a canvas so anyone can participate and edit a workbook without having to exit the meeting screen.
To create a "digital employee experience" for every employee, the company is also introducing Microsoft Viva Goals, which will be available beginning August 1. The new feature is a goal-setting and management solution that ensures teams and their members are aligned to an organization's strategic priorities to achieve results.
