Microsoft outage affects Teams, Azure and Xbox Live

A number of cloud-based Microsoft products are having issues right now, apparently as a result of an Azure Active Directory issue. Over the last hour or so many users have been unable to access Microsoft Teams, with the company’s 365 Status Twitter account tying it to a recent change to an authentication system.

The bad news is that the list of services affected is long — including not just Teams, but also Office, Exchange Online and Yammer. Xbox Live is also mentioned as one of the services experiencing issues. Its status page only notes a problem for anyone trying to redeem a code right now, although its Twitter account mentioned Game Streaming and Purchase issues.

The latest update as of 5:17 PM ET notes that a full remediation is expected within the next 60 minutes, so if your office uses Teams you know when to check back in.

Update (5:58 PM ET): Microsoft says it has fully rolled out the mitigation and is seeing a decrease in error rates.

Microsoft:

 CriticalAuthentication errors across multiple Microsoft services – Validating Mitigation

SUMMARY OF IMPACT: Starting at approximately 19:15 UTC on 15 Mar 2021, a subset of customers may experience issues authenticating into Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, Office and/or Dynamics, Xbox Live, and the Azure Portal. Other Azure services/offerings that rely on authentication infrastructure downstream may see further impact.

CURRENT STATUS: Engineering teams have rolled out a fix to all affected regions. Internal telemetry and customer reports suggests that the error rate for dependent services is rapidly decreasing. Microsoft services are starting to see signs of recovery. Some services and offerings may have varying times of recovery following the underlying fix. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes or as events warrant.

This message was last updated at 21:56 UTC on 15 March 2021