Microsoft working on a fix as users struggle to access Teams and other services

Microsoft (MSFT) said Monday afternoon that users may be unable to access Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365 services, including Microsoft Teams, Forms, Exchange Online email and others. In a tweet thread, the company said the issue may be affecting users worldwide.

“We’ve identified an issue with a recent change to an authentication system. We’re rolling back the update to mitigate impact,” Microsoft said, adding later that fixing the issue was taking longer than expected.

Around 5 p.m. ET, the company posted a status update saying it is “rolling out a mitigation worldwide,” and customers should begin to see the situation improve, with “full remediation” expected within an hour. An hour later, Microsoft said it had finished deploying the fix. “Microsoft 365 services continue the process of recovery and are showing decreasing error rates,” the company said. A number of large (though usually fairly brief) outages of workplace collaboration tools over the past year have caused frustration among workers and employers still operating remotely during the pandemic. On Monday afternoon, “Microsoft Teams” was trending on Twitter (TWTR) as users complained about — or, in some cases, celebrated — the inability to take video meetings or send in assignments. “If Microsoft Teams can stay down until 5 that would be great,” one user tweeted. Outage tracking website DownDetector listed more than 30,000 reports of issues with Microsoft Teams as of around 4 p.m. ET, though that number declined later in the afternoon. Hundreds of users also reported issues with Xbox Live, Microsoft Outlook and Office 365.