Microsoft Teams hit by global issue

Microsoft's Teams collaboration suite suffered a two-and-a-half hour global outage on Thursday after a software update by the vendor that went wrong.

Teams users reported problems in Australia and New Zealand, as well as across most Asean countries.

It appeared to be resolved at just 2.15pm AEST, although Microsoft later said that problems were persisting for some users, and that the impact had spread to other M365 services.

Microsoft attributed the outage to "a recent deployment [that] contained a broken connection to an internal storage service". 

Impacted users were unable to access Teams or "initiate messaging, calling, and meetings."

The vendor also later confirmed some downstream impacts, including to Microsoft Word integration with multiple services, Office Online, and SharePoint Online.

"The desktop app may sign in successfully, though all functionalities may be down, and users may see the following message: 'We ran into a problem. Reconnecting…'," Microsoft said.

"Users leveraging the web client may see a message stating 'Operation failed with unexpected error'."

Although users worldwide reported problems, time zone differences meant most of the impact of the problems was felt in this region.