Disruption at Microsoft: Teams and Outlook are working again – The Economy

It uploads, uploads, and loads. This is what happened to thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of users of products from the American software manufacturer Microsoft. A look at social media reveals that Microsoft’s infrastructure failure not only affected Germany, but users in the US and India also complained of poor performance and emails that couldn’t be recalled.

Microsoft has identified network changes as the cause of poor connections to Azure Cloud Division servers. The company said on Twitter that those matters have since been reversed. So the services should be running smoothly again for most customers.

The software group has not yet provided any information on the number of people affected. According to Azure, services have been affected in almost every region of the world. Only China and governments platform are not affected. In contrast to the failure last July, this time not only teams were affected, but almost all Microsoft products. Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive.

The failure caused some amusement on the SMS platform Twitter. This is understandable, especially for users in the USA. The companies there didn’t have much to fear. It was late at night in the United States. In Europe, on the other hand, the loss hit people at the start of basic working hours. In the thousands of companies where teleconferencing or hybrid conferencing is held, work may have stalled at first.

Just in time for the start of the working day in Germany

It is not unusual for software services to fail all over the world. In June 2022, for example, a problem with web infrastructure provider Cloudflare took hundreds of popular websites offline, including Shopify, Discord, and Fitbit. Even messengers like Whatsapp or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have to run into problems from time to time. However, it is very unusual for Microsoft’s productivity services to fail completely around the world.

The outage comes at a bad time for Microsoft. Regulators in the European Union and the United States have repeatedly considered whether the company has become too big and too strong in some areas. There are few alternatives to productivity software, especially since Microsoft can offer customers very attractive offers for complete solutions. In recent years, Microsoft has been trying hard to get customers to work in the cloud rather than on-premises products. The danger of this is clearly shown by today’s failure: if in the future everything will run through the Microsoft cloud, then if this cloud fails, then everything will stop too.