Microsoft reports outage; services restored after few hours
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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FIDE Women's World Cup final: Humpy draws with Divya in first game
Batumi (Georgia), Jul 26 (PTI): Young Indian International Master Divya Deshmukh held her nerves to hold stalwart Koneru Humpy to a draw in game 1 of the FIDE Women's World Cup final, with both players having their share of opportunities to take the lead here on Saturday.
The draw with black means Humpy, the two-time World Rapid champion, holds a slight edge going in the second and final game under the classical chess rules in the two-game mini-match, and should the deadlock continue, games of shorter duration will be played to determine the winner.
Humpy employed the Queen's gambit accepted as black and it turned out to be a pretty fascinating game right out of the opening as Divya, 19, came up with a piece sacrifice early to deny the black king the right to castle.
Humpy was the first to err and, according to computers, Divya had things under control on the 14th move. However in her bid to recover the extra material, the Nagpur girl, who has secured a place in the Candidates tournament with her sterling performance here, missed a promising continuation.
What followed the exchange of all minor pieces and the ensuing queen and rook endgame gave enough counter play to both players. The game was eventually drawn after Humpy sacrificed her rook to force perpetual checks.
"The game saw an extremely sharp battle with the game ending in a draw in 41 moves. On move 7, Divya made her aggressive intentions clear by offering another pawn,
which looked like home preparation. Humpy made a practical decision of refraining from taking the pawn and a balanced position was reached by move 10 by white," said Grandmaster Pravin Thipsay, an Arjuna awardee and the first Indian to get a chess Grandmaster norm.
"However, instead of developing the undeveloped Knight, Humpy retreated the centralised Knight on move 10, giving huge positional advantage to Divya. Divya could have gained huge positional advantage on the 12th move by moving a rook. However, she chose to play for King side attack by sacrificing a piece instead.
"Humpy, too, erred at this stage and instead of moving the King to Queen side, moved it to the King side. Divya, on move 14, could have obtained a crushing attack by threatening a mate by developing her Queen. Instead she chose to exchange a pair of Bishops first, which enabled Humpy to defend her King by returning the piece," said Thipsay.
"Players thus reached a balanced Queen and two Rooks ending. Divya continued to play ambitiously and tried to attack Humpy’s King but the latter defended accurately and the game was drawn in 41 moves by perpetual check," he added.
In the play-off for the third place, Chinese players Zhongyi Tan, the former women's world champion and top seed Lei Tingjie also decided to split points out of a Queen’s gambit declined game.
The opening raised visions of a close contest between the two but having been knocked out of title race in the previous round, none of them wanted to take any huge risk. It was still a middle game when the players shook hands.
With the top two positions sealed for the Indians, the berth to the next Candidates is also assigned, while the player finishing third will also get an entry to the premier event scheduled for 2026.
Results: Divya Deshmukh (Ind) drew with Koneru Humpy (Ind); Zhongyi Tan (Chn) drew with Tingjie Lei (Chn).
