Microsoft major outage in the UK and across Europe

This morning businesses awoke to the news that there had been a Microsoft major outage impacting a vast number of users across the world.

Earlier today Microsoft 365 Admin Centre reported that users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 Services.

Microsoft Teams, the popular workplace chat app, appears to be one of the biggest services affected. Used by more than 280 million people globally, Microsoft Teams forms an integral part of daily operations for businesses and schools alike, which use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organise their workflow. Consequently this meant as many UK businesses, including those in Suffolk, were starting work this morning many were faced with being unable to use their computers to carry out their normal day to day tasks.

Alongside Microsoft Teams, it was also stated that many 365 programs including Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Power BI, Microsoft Intune and even Microsoft Graph have all been impacted. With outages also being reported within the gaming service Xbox Live and Microsoft’s cloud computing business Azure.

Microsoft has not disclosed the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from outage tracking website Downdetector shows more than 5,000 people in the UK have reported that email service Outlook was inaccessible. Outage spikes have also been reported globally with 3,900 incidents in India and over 900 in Japan.

In the UK, the reports of the outages peaked at around 8am GMT. Microsoft has now announced that they have identified a wide-area networking (WAN) routing change which is what caused impact to the service. They have now rolled back the change and monitoring closely as the service recovers. Customers who had previously reported impact are now also reporting recovery and no additional effect has been seen.

Business as usual is the critical element to implement as soon as possible in the event of global issue like this. As we always highly recommend at Ipswich based IT Support Company Corbel, it is vital that you safeguard your critical systems and data with a clear, robust and fully tested back up plan in place. For those of our clients in Ipswich, Felixstowe and across Suffolk who have their MS365 backed up as part of their business continuity planning, including their files, emails and Teams, the repercussions of this extensive global outage were minimal. With a Backup of M365 you can recover your files/emails from an Azure independent UK cloud based back up and continue to work ‘offline’. Without having this backup in place, many workplace users across the UK were left without access to important emails and files for the duration of the morning.  

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Corbel are award winning IT Experts offering IT Support, Cyber Security and Workplace Recovery services to businesses across Suffolk. If you would like some further information on Backups or a free copy of our Disaster Recovery Plan template, get in touch and email info@corbel.co.uk or give us a call on 01473 241515.