New Delhi, Jan 25: Microsoft's online services, including Teams and Outlook, faced an outage for a few hours on Wednesday and the issues were fixed later, with the technology major saying it is monitoring the recovery across the services.

Thousands of users across the globe, including from India, reported issues with various services as the company had reported 'service degradation' for a number of its Microsoft 365 services, including Teams and Outlook.

The cloud computing platform of Microsoft Azure also faced an outage.

According to the network outage monitoring platform Down Detector, the complaints about Microsoft services outage started around 1 pm IST.

The company in its service status update for Azure Networking said that its customer experienced issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources between 7.05 coordinated universal time (UTC) or 12.35 PM IST and 9.45 UTC or 3.15 PM IST.

"We identified a recent change to WAN (wide area network) as the underlying cause and have rolled back this change. Networking telemetry shows recovery from 9.00 UTC (or 2.30 PM IST) onwards across all regions and services, with the final networking equipment recovering at 09.35 UTC (3.05 PM IST).

"Most impacted Microsoft services automatically recovered once network connectivity was restored, and we worked to recover the remaining impacted services," the update on the Azure status page said.

Services were back after about a few hours, but some customers continued to report problems in accessing certain services, as per Microsoft's dashboard.

Microsoft identified a potential networking issue behind the glitch in Microsoft 365 services and said that it has rolled back a network change that it believed was causing an impact.

"We're monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect. We've isolated the problem to networking configuration issues, and we're analysing the best mitigation strategy to address these without causing additional impact," according to a tweet from Microsoft 365 official account.

The official handle of Microsoft 365 Status tweeted that it continues to monitor the recovery across the service, and some customers are reporting mitigation.

"We're also connecting the service to additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process," it said.

The Service Health Status dashboard of Microsoft showed that Microsoft 365 was back and running.

The Azure status page update mentioned that it will follow up in 3 days with a preliminary Post Incident Report (PIR), which will cover the initial root cause and repair items.

"We'll follow that up 14 days later with a final PIR where we will share a deep dive into the incident," the update said.

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Barcelona (AP): Real Madrid slapped players Federico Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni with half-a-million-euro ($588,000) fines on Friday for their altercation during practice.

The massive fines came a day after the midfielders tussled when the team trained. Valverde said in a post on social media on Thursday that no punches were thrown. But Valverde knocked his head on a table and he suffered a small cut that required a brief hospital visit.

On social media, Valverde initially called it a “meaningless fight” with a teammate and said “everything has been blown out of proportion."

His employers, however, considered it a significant enough breach of team discipline to nail both Valverde and Tchouaméni with fines that bite even the bank account of a top soccer player. The half-a-million euro penalties reflect the reputational damage the club was enduring in a chaotic end to a disappointing season.

In a statement, the 15-time European champion said its disciplinary action was concluded after both players expressed to the club “their complete remorse for what happened and apologized to one another.”

Madrid added they also apologized to their teammates, the coaching staff and club supporters, as well as showing their willingness to accept whatever disciplinary action the club deemed “opportune.”

Tchouaméni was back training with Madrid on Friday, two days before they play at Barcelona in a clasico. Madrid has to win otherwise Barcelona will be crowned La Liga champion.

After being notified of the fine, he posted a public apology to the club and its fans on social media.

“What happened this week in training is unacceptable,” Tchouaméni wrote. "I say this while thinking about the example we are expected to set for young people, whether in football or at school.

“Above all, I am sorry for the image we projected of the club.”

Valverde was not at practice due to the head knock.

Both players are set to play in the World Cup next month, with Tchouaméni playing for France and Valverde for Uruguay. 

Chaotic end to a poor season

===================

The run-in between the players, who for seasons have played side by side in Madrid's midfield, came after they argued this week in previous training sessions. But tempers boiled over on Thursday. Spanish media was rife with reports that the players previously disagreed over the club's decision to let coach Xabi Alonso go after just months on the job.

It was not the only altercation involving Madrid players during training this week. Álvaro Carreras confirmed he was in a “minor” incident with a teammate. Spanish media said he and fellow defender Antonio Rüdiger got into a scuffle.

Álvaro Arbeloa, the coach who was promoted from Madrid's reserve team when Alonso was fired in January, will face tough questions on what went wrong inside the changing room when he gives a press conference on Saturday ahead of the clasico at Camp Nou.

Madrid is facing a second consecutive campaign without a major trophy amid rumors in the Spanish media that club president Florentino Pérez is considering bringing back Jose Mourinho to straighten out his underperforming team.