Update 25/01/2023 7:15 p.m. IST: Microsoft’s services are back online after a downtime that lasted for more than four hours. The headline is changed to reflect that.
“We determined that a change made to the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN) impacted connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, connectivity between services within regions, as well as ExpressRoute connections,” the company said on its Azure cloud service site.
Update 25/01/2023 3:30 p.m. IST: Microsoft said that it has rolled back a network change that was probably the cause for the outage and the company is monitoring its services. Separately, the Xbox Support account said that services facing issues should be back online.
Scores of Microsoft services including Teams, Xbox Live, Outlook and Microsoft 365 suite are inaccessible to thousands of users around the globe. Microsoft has acknowledged the outage and said it’s working on a fix.
According to DownDetector, a popular tool that tracks service reliability, users began reporting accessibility issues with multiple services including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, Minecraft, Azure, GitHub and Microsoft Store about an hour ago (2:30 a.m. PST).
Microsoft’s status page for Office 365 currently says that “users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.” Apart from the services reported by users, the company said SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Graph were also facing outages.
“We’ve identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps,” the page said.
Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees last week as a response to “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities.”
“As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less,” Nadella wrote in an email memo sent to employees. “We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”
He added that historically the company has had to make these kinds of “hard choices” to remain relevant in the industry “that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts.”