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Microsoft Teams slowly returns to normal after hours-long outage

The Microsoft Teams logo is seen in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on Jan. 25, 2023. Microsoft Teams was reported as down for thousands of users on Friday. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

If your Microsoft Teams work chat went quiet this Friday, chances are your boss didn’t let you out early for the weekend.

The workspace chat and videoconferencing service started experiencing issues in various regions of the world earlier in the day, with the outage ultimately lasting for hours before slowly returning to normal.

Over 2,500 incidents with Microsoft Teams were logged on outage tracking website Downdetector.com at the peak of the outage close to 2 p.m. Eastern. Microsoft acknowledged the outage on X, formerly known as Twitter, at 11:45 a.m. Eastern.

Downdetector is a service that tracks outages by collecting status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

By 8 p.m. Eastern, the service was logging around 20 reports of service issues.

The Microsoft Teams logo is seen in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on Jan. 25, 2023. More than 13,000 issues with Microsoft Teams were reported on Downdetector.com as of 2 p.m. Eastern on Friday. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Microsoft said in a post on X that it had identified a “networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams Service,” though it’s not exactly clear what caused the issue.

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More than 320 million monthly active users are on Teams, Microsoft said in its first quarter earnings report on Oct. 24.

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Users on Downdetector have been reporting delayed messages and repeated notifications, among other issues.

“We’ve completed the failover in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region and service telemetry is showing some improvement,” Microsoft said at 1:22 p.m. Eastern.

“The failovers for the North and South America regions are ongoing and we continue to monitor.”

At 3:40 p.m. Eastern, the company alerted users that the North and South America failovers “did not provide immediate relief to all end users” in the regions, but was “seeing improvements.”

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The number of reported outages on Downdetector began to decline around 2 p.m. Eastern and was down to a little over 150 reports by 6 p.m. Eastern.

At 8:15 p.m. Eastern, Microsoft said it was seeing “significant improvements or full remediation in many of the Teams features affected by this incident.”

“We’re closely monitoring the fixes and workstreams to address any remaining impact scenarios associated with this event,” the post on X said.

It remained unclear as of Friday night what caused the outage.

— with files from Reuters and Global News’ Eric Stober

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