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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Hamas accepts cease-fire proposal for Gaza, but Israel's stance still uncertain
Jerusalem, May 6: Hamas announced Monday it has accepted an Egyptian-Qatari cease-fire proposal, but there was no immediate word from Israel, leaving it uncertain whether a deal had been sealed to bring a halt to the seven-month-long war in Gaza.
It was the first glimmer of hope that a deal might avert further bloodshed. Hours earlier, Israel ordered some 100,000 Palestinians to begin evacuating the southern Gaza town of Rafah, signalling that an attack was imminent. The United States and other key allies of Israel oppose an offensive on Rafah, where around 1.4 million Palestinians, more than half of Gaza's population, are sheltering.
An official familiar with Israeli thinking said Israeli officials were examining the proposal, but the plan approved by Hamas was not the framework Israel proposed.
An American official also said the US was still waiting to learn more about the Hamas position and whether it reflected an agreement to what had already been signed off on by Israel and international negotiators or something else. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as a stance was still being formulated.
Details of the proposal have not been released. Touring the region last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had pressed Hamas to take the deal, and Egyptian officials said it called for a cease-fire of multiple stages starting with a limited hostage release and some Israeli troop pullbacks from Gaza. The two sides would also negotiate a “permanent calm” that would lead to a full hostage release and greater Israeli withdrawal, they said.
