Microsoft Teams suffers outage affecting thousands, sparking user frustration

Microsoft Teams suffers outage affecting thousands, sparking user frustration

Microsoft Corp.’s Teams suffered an outage Friday, prompting users to voice their frustration on social media with the workplace-communications platform.

“User reports indicate problems at Microsoft Teams,” the Down Detector website, which monitors online outages, posted Friday. Down Detector showed that as of 1:43 p.m. Eastern time, users had submitted 14,599 reports of problems with Microsoft Teams.

“We’ve identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we’re performing a failover to remediate impact,” Microsoft 365’s official updates account on X posted Friday morning.

In a failover, a backup system is used to take over an operation.

From the archives (April 2020): Microsoft Teams continues to grow at a blistering pace

“We’ve completed the failover in the EMEA region and service telemetry is showing some improvement,” read a post from the account shortly afterwards. “The failovers for the North and South America regions are ongoing and we continue to monitor.”

In a post on X at 3:40 p.m. Eastern time, Microsoft said that the failover operation “did not provide immediate relief” to all users in North and South America. “However, we’re seeing improvements as we continue to optimize traffic patterns and apply configuration changes intended to reduce customer impact as quickly as possible,” the company added.

“Our network and backend service optimization efforts are ongoing, and we’re monitoring positive internal telemetry signals to confirm that our mitigations are effectively reducing the impact to customers,” Microsoft posted on X at 5:12 p.m. Eastern time.

When asked for comment on the extent of the outage and the number of users affected, Microsoft referred MarketWatch to Microsoft 365’s official updates on Twitter.

Teams users on social media shared their experiences with the outage. “Microsoft Teams users are experiencing issues with delays in delivering chat messages, messages not being delivered, etc.,” Cedarville University’s information-technology department posted on X. “This is a known issue and Microsoft is in the process of resolving the problem.”

“@MicrosoftTeams does not work at all!” wrote user @Frau_Rabe on X. “If you’re using this ‘platform’ to communicate inside your company or with your clients, watch out! Because is not reliable! does not send the messages on time and don’t load the images.”

“Is there an outage? Our team is having trouble even logging in and I cannot get anything to load @MicrosoftTeams,” wrote user @jenniferznanni on X.

Microsoft introduced the Teams platform in 2017, and it quickly became the company’s fastest-growing app, according to the tech giant.

Microsoft shares ended Friday’s session down 0.2% and are up 62.8% in the last 52 weeks, outpacing the S&P 500 index’s gain of 20.2% over the same period.