Microsoft Teams experienced a lengthy outage on Monday, leaving many Slack-free office workers in a state of utterly sarcastic shock.
The largely-unloved workplace chat app was unavailable for a number of hours during Monday for Microsoft’s Office 365 users.
Microsoft says the outage was, quite unbelievably, down to an expired certificate that Microsoft hadn’t renewed. The SSL certificate in question makes it possible for a secure connection to be made with Microsoft’s servers.
So, when attempting to load the app, Teams users were greeted with an error screen reading: “We’re sorry–we’ve run into an issue.” It then asked users to restart the app to no avail. In a tweet, Microsoft’s 365 Status Twitter account revealed the company was developing a fix. Gee, thanks guys!
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The tweet reads as follows: “We’ve determined that an authentication certificate has expired causing, users to have issues using the service. We’re developing a fix to apply a new certificate to the service which will remediate impact. Further updates can be found under TM202916 in the admin center.”
From 12pm eastern (5pm UK time) most users were back online. A few hours later, Microsoft confirmed the fix had reached all users.
We successfully deployed the fix to the affected infrastructure and conducted additional remediation actions to resolve the issue. More information can be found under TM202916.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) February 3, 2020
Microsoft has launched a recent charm offensive with Teams, which forms part of its larger Office hub productivity software suite. Making such a basic error and taking hours to sort it isn’t a good look for the company, given its ambitions to match Slack in the hearts and minds of offices around the world.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.