Microsoft’s team communication tool, Microsoft Teams, is experiencing a severe outage this morning here in Europe. Microsoft confirmed the problems on Twitter and says it’s actively investigating the problem.

It seems like most of the affected users are in Europe. The outage is most likely caused by the increased usage of the service, fueled by more people working from home and following their government guidance.

Microsoft Teams being down right now is obviously not a good situation for anyone involved. Microsoft recently started giving away 6-months of paid features in Teams for free to help people work better remotely during the coronavirus outbreak. The increased usage has probably led to Microsoft scrambling to support all these new users and demand.

We’re investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams. Please refer to TM206544 in your admin center for further details. ^JP

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) March 16, 2020

Microsoft has probably already started scaling up its servers to support the increased usage, so maybe these issues are unrelated. Xbox Live went down over the weekend, too.

However, people need services like Teams to just work at this time more than ever before. More companies and people are working remotely now, and Teams not working properly is not a good look for Microsoft’s flagship team communication tool.

Tagged with Microsoft Teams, Teams