Microsoft services such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Azure, and Microsoft 365 witnessed a global outage on Wednesday. The services became inaccessible to several users including those in India. Several users took to social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn, complaining about this issue. The impacted services also include Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft One Drive for Business and Microsoft Graph.
Acknowledging the outage, Microsoft in a tweet said that they have isolated the problem. In a tweet, Microsoft 365 Status said, "We’ve isolated the problem to networking configuration issues, and we’re analyzing the best mitigation strategy to address these without causing additional impact."
The company asked its users to refer to its admin center for more info. The company said, "We’re investigating issues impacting multiple 365 services, More info can be found in the admin center under MO502273."
"We’ve identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps. You can find additional information on our status page at https://msft.it/6011eAYPc or on SHD under MO502273," it added.
The company said that users who are impacted by the affected infrastructure may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, more than 3000 users in India are facing the outage. Microsoft Teams and Outlook are the two most common professional applications used in India. An outage would mean work getting impacted to a large extent. The outage has also impacted corporate employees in Australia, Britain, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, is also facing a global outage. In response to several tweets over the issue, Azure said that the company's engineering team is investigating the issue. "Hi there, thanks for reaching out. We are aware of the issue and our engineering team is investigating it at present. We appreciate your patience, more information will be shared in due time. Please refer to msft.it/6015eAYkB ^EM," Azure Support tweeted.
The outage comes days after Microsoft announced its plans to sack as many as 10,000 employees — about 5% of its workforce — by the end of the third fiscal quarter of 2023, last week. The US-based tech giant is looking to cut costs amid the looming threat of a global recession.
In an email to employees, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said the company will align its cost structure with revenue and where it sees customer demand. "We are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10,000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3. This represents less than 5% of our total employee base, with some notifications happening today. It's important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas. We know this is a challenging time for each person impacted. The senior leadership team and I are committed that as we go through this process, we will do so in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible," the Microsoft CEO wrote.
