UAE: Microsoft global outage impacts thousands of Outlook, Teams users

Microsoft Corp on Wednesday said it was investigating an outage affecting hundreds of users in the UAE and thousands more across the globe. Users have been unable to access multiple services from the provider, including Teams and Outlook.

Azure's status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The tech giant took to Twitter and wrote: "We're investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.."

An hour after the reported outage, the company identified the networking issue. In a statement it said, "We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps."

Microsoft added in a tweet it had rolled back a network change that it believed was causing the issue. "We've rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact. We're monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect," it said.

The company did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from the outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 3,900 incidents in India and over 900 in Japan. In the UAE, more than 500 incidents were reported after the issue started at approximately 10.50am. Outage reports also spiked in Australia and Britain.

Users in the Emirates reported that almost all the services - MS Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, etc - have been down for over an hour. People were also unable to exchange messages, join calls or use any features of Teams application. Some also reported issues accessing administrative portals.

Many people took to Twitter to share updates about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.

Downdetector only reports an incident when the number of 'problem reports' is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day. This heat map below shows where the user-submitted problem reports.

Among the other services affected were Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, according to the company's status page.

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