The FINANCIAL — Microsoft’s chat and communications tool, Microsoft Teams, is down as thousands of workers started to sign into the service in an attempt to work remotely due to coronavirus pandemic. Connectivity issues affected people in the UK, Spain, France and Northern Italy.
Microsoft Teams is experiencing significant problems across Europe as people work from home amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The platform is popular with remote workers and allows colleagues to collaborate as they avoid public spaces and offices. A spike in connectivity issues was seen at 9am GMT as millions of Europeans tried to log on to work from home. More than three-quarters of the issues (77 per cent) were claimed to be with server connection. Other problems include accessing the website and logging in. Connectivity issues affected people in the UK, Spain, France and Northern Italy – all locations hit hard by the COVID-19 outbreak. Other users reported that there was issues sending and receiving messages, Daily Mail reported.
“We’re investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams. Please refer to TM206544 in your admin center for further details,” Microsoft Twitter account for updates wrote.
The timing is less than ideal, just as many businesses are encouraging employees to work remotely and collaborate using services like Microsoft Teams. Even schools are also using tools like Microsoft Teams for remote education, with some schools in The Netherlands instructing students to log into the service today for digital questions. This is the second major outage to hit Microsoft Teams this year. The service also went down after Microsoft forgot to renew a key SSL security certificate last month. Microsoft eventually got Teams working again after three hours of issues, and apologized for missing the expired certificate. Microsoft’s Teams issues also come just hours after Xbox Live went down briefly. Microsoft hasn’t revealed the exact cause of the Xbox Live outage, but it’s likely related to an increase in demand. Steam reached a new concurrent online user record of 20 million, just as people start to stay at home more during the coronavirus pandemic, according to The Verge.
Recently it was announced that, Microsoft Teams and users of the consumer version of Skype will be able to message and call each other by the end of next month. Federation capability between the services will complete its rollout by the end of April 2020. The interoperability will work both ways, allowing people on both services to communicate with each other. Being able to message and call people between the two services might be enough to push more people towards Microsoft Teams. Some organizations are understandably hesitant to switch to a service that limits the number of people users can communicate with. While the capability to message and call between Microsoft Teams and Skype will be available, it will be disabled by default. Admins will have to go to the Microsoft 365 admin center and enable the feature within the external access settings area. In 2017, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Teams would replace Skye for Business online. Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021, so Microsoft will want to migrate all requested features over before that date, Windows Central wrote.
