*Disclaimer: This article is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Data&StorageAsean.
With the recent Microsoft Teams outage that reportedly lasted for several hours, affecting tens of thousands of customers globally, the question about the service reliability of industry-leading giants like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and numerous others is once again in the limelight.
You will often witness such big names promoting the robust stability and viability of the platforms under their domain when, at the practical level, the situation is quite the opposite. Inspired by these claims, cloud-driven businesses, for instance, spend a considerable chunk of their budget on cloud migration, data protection and other business-critical workloads and applications, only to realise that cloud vendors could not keep to their words.
Microsoft Teams Outage Map
With regards to the MS Teams outage, Microsoft’s official statement considers a recent deployment-a software update- containing a “broken connection to an internal storage service,” as the apparent cause of the outage that also took the users of Microsoft O365 under its radar.
“We are addressing any residual impact related to this event. Additionally, we are monitoring for any signs of failure until we are confident that all functions of the service are fully recovered,” the company further clarified on its website.
While Microsoft has not released the precise number of affected users, DownDetector, a global outage monitoring website, cited over 4800 complaints in the United States alone, with 63 per cent facing server connection issues, 22 per cent application accessibility problems, and 15 per cent unable to join the video conferences.
With #MicrosoftTeams trending and meme culture in full swing, Twitterati, on the other hand, has taken the outage issue seriously.
“MS Teams is down; the corporate world is going crazy haha,” stated one Twitter user. Another one said, “Microsoft Teams has stopped, and half the working world along with it #MicrosoftTeams.”
It is not the first time the tech giants have been hit with massive system breakdown problems. Last year, in November, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, kept billions of social media users at bay for approximately 6 hours due to a DNS issue.
Therefore, these massive tech leaders must fulfil their claims and ensure the 24/7 continuity and reliability of their platforms or else risk goodwill and brand loyalty.
