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What’s going on with Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft’s Team collaboration service has hit some snags this week in stark contrast to the company’s shameless promotion of Teams over other useful services.

We’ll explain what happened and what you can do if the Teams troubles happen again.

On both Monday and Tuesday this week, many people had trouble logging into their Teams accounts.  The troubles were mostly in European based servers

Knowing it might be limited to one area isn’t a lot of help because most people don’t know where their Teams account is located.  Server allocations (tenants) can and do change.

Microsoft did their usual ‘hide the facts’ routine (not what’s needed now, of all times).  According to MSFT there was a ‘degradation’ of Teams service for ‘some’ customers. The mysterious code ‘SI#TM206556’ was referenced without further explanation, as if everyone has Microsoft coding implanted in their brain <sigh>.

They’ve also taken to calling service levels ‘fluid’ which seems to mean anything from working 100% down to anything above completely shut down <bigger sigh>.

The specific problem seemed to be with the login process which some Microsoft servers could not handle properly.

If it happens again …

Microsoft hasn’t given a lot of detail but here’s some suggestions for workarounds or preventative measures.

Move to another country

Some people reported getting into Teams by going through a US based Microsoft server. Do that by using VPN through a US point then going to office.com (not office.de or similar).

With a future login problem it could be the other way around and we’ll be relying on the European or Asian servers!

Get the Teams app

The Teams app for Windows, Mac, Apple or Android devices has some offline support.

Sync Teams folders

Setup Teams to Sync files to your computer.  Then you can keep working on documents and files even if the online service isn’t available. Look for the Sync option in the Teams app.

Ignore Microsoft’s opportunistic marketing, Teams is not for everyone

Find out what you need to use Microsoft Teams

 

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