Microsoft Teams still on mute: Vid conf system crashes, 'potential networking issue' blamed

Updated Microsoft’s video conferencing service Teams has suffered a massive outage causing widespread disruption as people in the United States logged in to start work on Wednesday.

Problems started at just as the American East Coast working day began and have escalated further, with complaints pouring in from across the country.

“We're investigating an issue in which users located in North America may be experiencing delays when receiving chat messages within Microsoft Teams,” the official Microsoft 365 status Twitter account warned at 0751 PST (1551 UTC) - more than two hours after the first reports of problems.

We've identified a potential networking issue that may be causing the problem. We’re working to confirm our findings while simultaneously exploring the optimal solution to remediate impact. Additional details can be found in the admin center under TM240228.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) February 17, 2021

But that was just the start: soon it acknowledged that live events were also down and that it wasn’t just North America affected. An hour later Microsoft has put it down to a “potential networking issue” but so far at least there’s no sign of when the service will be back up and running.

Teams has seen rapid growth in the past year of COVID-19 lockdowns, but technical problems continue to bedevil the system. Only last month Microsoft's earnings call was interrupted when Teams took a dive.

In the meantime, based on a quick preview of a flood of social media posts from people working from home thanks to the global pandemic, there appear to be three main courses of action: take a break from the endless cycle of work meetings and get on with some other work; be very mad about it and bother colleagues over email instead; or switch to Zoom. The fourth option - putting your feet up with a nice cuppa - is not being spoken about.

Updates will be added as soon as more information becomes available. ®

Updated to add at 0030 UTC, February 18

Although Microsoft says "the majority of impact has been mitigated," some users may still be experiencing trouble with the service.