Microsoft working on full recovery for outage affecting Outlook, Teams that was due to ‘potential networking issue’

SINGAPORE — Microsoft is in the process of speeding up recovery for several of its services, after it identified a potential networking problem that has led to users being unable to access Outlook, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online, for instance.

The outage began on Wednesday (Jan 25) afternoon and when contacted, its Singapore office referred TODAY to its Twitter page and its “service health status” webpage.

On its Microsoft 365 Status page with Twitter, the software giant said at around 7pm Singapore time: “We're continuing to monitor the recovery across the service and some customers are reporting mitigation. We’re also connecting the service to additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process.”

TODAY is enquiring from Microsoft’s Singapore office how many users here were affected by the technical problems and for how long.

Earlier in the day, in a tweet made at 3.31pm Singapore time, it said: “We're investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.” It then gave a link to its service health status webpage in the comments thread.

An hour later, it posted a tweet that read: "We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps."

It is not known how widespread the outage is, but internet service tracking site Downdetector showed that there were more than 3,900 incidents in India and more than 900 in Japan. 

Outage reports also went up in Australia, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

In an earlier update on its service health status webpage, Microsoft said: “Customers may experience issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency (lagging) and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources in Public Azure regions, as well as other Microsoft services including M365, Power BI.”

Some of the other services affected were Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 admin portal, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Identity and Endpoint.

As of 9.50am Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) or 5.45pm Singapore time, the webpage stated that there were consistent signs of recovery detected across multiple regions and services.

“Most customers should now see full recovery as Wide Area Network (WAN) networking has recovered fully. We are working to monitor and ensure full recovery for services that were impacted.”

Wide Area Network refers to a network in which the computers connected may be far apart, generally having a radius of more than 1km.

At around 8pm Singapore time, its service health status webpage was updated to say: “We’re continuing to monitor the service and take actions to confirm full recovery.”