Microsoft announced today, Wednesday, that it has restarted all its cloud services after a network failure caused its Azure cloud platform to stop, in addition to services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the world.
The Azure status page showed services affected in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.
Services in China and its platform for governments were not affected.
Before noon, Azure reported that most users should have seen services resume after a full restart of Microsoft’s wide area network.
The disruption of the Azure cloud computing platform can affect a range of services and cause a domino effect, as almost all large global companies use the platform.
Azure has 15 million business customers and more than 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data.
Companies have become more dependent on online platforms after the pandemic led to more employees working from home.
Microsoft previously said that it had determined that the network connectivity issue occurred with devices on the company’s wide area network.
She added that this affected customers’ connection to the Internet with Azure, as well as communication between services in data centers.
It added that it had rolled back a network change it believed was causing the problem and was using “additional infrastructure to expedite the process of restoring services”.
It did not disclose the number of affected users, but data from the “Down Detector” website to track malfunctions showed that there were thousands of cases distributed across continents.
During the outage, users experienced problems exchanging messages, joining calls, or using any of the Teams features.
Many took to Twitter to share developments regarding the outage, as the hashtag “Microsoft Teams” was widely circulated on the social networking site.
The Teams application, which is used by more than 280 million people worldwide, is an integral part of the daily operations of companies and schools, which use it to make calls, arrange and hold meetings, and organize their workflow.
