Microsoft 365 outage due to WAN router compromise

An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world's largest companies use the platform.... Microsoft did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption

Whereas the data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed thousands of incidents across continents.... Azure's share of the cloud computing market rose to 30% in 2022, trailing Amazon's AWS, according to estimates from BofA Global Research.... During the outage, users faced problems in exchanging messages, joining calls or using any features of Teams application.

The list of services impacted by the outage included Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, PowerBi, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and Microsoft Defender for Identity,

Many users took to Twitter to share updates about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.... Among the other services affected were Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, according to the company's status page.

Microsoft is blaming “a potential networking issue” for this and “reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps and any user serviced by the affected infrastructure may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services,” says the page.

As part of a planned change to update the IP address on a WAN router, a command given to the router caused it to send messages to all other routers in the WAN, which resulted in all of them recomputing their adjacency and forwarding tables," Microsoft said.

Outlook, the email service from Microsoft is down in India and in a few more markets as per various reports from Twitter. This looks like an issue related to a server and the company is yet to comment on the same. Some users have also reported that Microsoft’s video calling app Teams is also unresponsive for select users. Teams is the app that many businesses use to ensure their employees stay connected.

Microsoft says this week's five-hour-long Microsoft 365 worldwide outage was caused by a router IP address change that led to packet forwarding issues between all other routers in its Wide Area Network (WAN).

Following this incident, Microsoft says that it's now blocking highly impactful commands from being executed and that it will also require all command execution to follow guidelines for safe configuration changes.