It started as just a little outage of Microsoft Teams but things soon got a lot worse for customers relying on Microsoft’s online services during a widespread outage on Thursday 21st July 2022.
According to Microsoft, the trouble started with a “broken connection to an internal storage service”. It initially appeared that troubles were limited to some Teams users but it became obvious there were more customers affected.
At Microsoft’s own admission the ‘downstream impact’ extended to:
- Microsoft Teams (Access, chat, meetings, and Microsoft Teams Room device issues joining meetings)
- Exchange Online (Delays sending mail)
- Office Online (Microsoft Word access issues)
- Microsoft Word within multiple services (Inability to load)
- SharePoint Online (Microsoft Word access issues)
- Microsoft Graph API (Any service relying on this API may be affected)
- Windows 365 (Unable to provision Cloud PCs)
- Microsoft 365 Admin center (Inability to access)
- Microsoft Forms (Inability to use via Teams)
- Project Online (Inability to access)
- PowerPlatform and PowerAutomate (Inability to create an environment with a database)
- Autopatches within Microsoft Managed Desktop
- Yammer (Impact to Yammer experiments)
From start to finish it took Microsoft about 12 hours to fix the problem and get services restored (3:07am to 3:14pm US Eastern 21 July). In other words, most of a Thursday working day in North America – ouch.
Microsoft 365 Admins can see the history of these outages at Admin | Health | Service Health then search for MO402741 and TM402718