As coronavirus forces millions to work from home, Microsoft Teams suffers major outages
The worldwide coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is leading to many people self-isolating, and employers encouraging -- or requiring -- staff to work from home. Many schools also decided to turn to remote teaching solutions to keep pupils away from the risk of infection.
Just as millions of people settle into the idea of remote working or learning, many for the first time, Microsoft Teams is suffering with major problems. Users found that they were unable to send messages via Teams, and were met instead by a notification reading: "we're sorry -- we've run into an issue".
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While the outage primarily affected people in Europe, there were issues in other parts of the world as well. Downdetector shows the problems are hitting central Europeans the hardest. No reason has been given for the issues, but it is likely that it comes as a direct result of a massive increase in the number of users, all trying to log in at around the same time.
Microsoft's support team tweeted about the problems via the Microsoft 365 account:
We're investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams. Please refer to TM206544 in your admin center for further details. ^JP
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) March 16, 2020
The problem -- according to Microsoft, at least -- has now been sorted out, as the company tweeted a couple of hours later:
TM206544 chat impact has been mitigated. Please refer to the admin center for further details. ^JP
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) March 16, 2020
At the moment, it is not clear how Microsoft fixed the problem, nor how many people it affected.
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