During the pandemic, Microsoft Teams became a lifeline for businesses everywhere, especially at the enterprise level. In fact, over 500,000 organizations use Microsoft Teams as their default messaging platform. Yet, despite Microsoft’s impressive success, worldwide outages have caused a ripple of unease in recent months.
A Wave of Recent Microsoft Teams Outages
On September 28, 2020, a massive outage occurred in the United States that stayed unresolved for several hours. Users of Microsoft products like Teams, Outlook, Office 365, and Azure could not access their accounts. Microsoft was able to get everything back up and running but over the next few days in early October, more sporadic outages followed without explanation.
More recently in March 2021, a worldwide outage remained unresolved for more than four hours as millions of subscribers scrambled for answers. Microsoft stated that the issue was caused by “a recent change to an authentication system” and rolled the change back. Then on April 1st, 2021, Teams had another brief interruption due to a DNS issue affecting multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services.
Should Enterprise Be Wary of Teams?
While the team at Microsoft quickly solved these problems and fully restored their messaging platform, these recent incidents have raised concerns in the enterprise world. These outages may seem like temporary inconveniences from a casual first glance, but cutting communication capabilities can have severe business consequences, especially since so many companies depend on digital solutions to replace their physical offices. Even just a few hours of downtime can lead to massive financial losses in certain industries.
Microsoft Teams is an impressive platform, but the repeated outages reveal that they are still working out some wrinkles while adding new security and functionality. It is important to remember that Teams isn’t as mature as other prominent players in the space, yet still receives high adoption rates from being a natural fit within the Microsoft Office platform. Even though Microsoft is a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in UCaaS, these growing pains will likely continue for their 115 million daily users.
.jpg?sfvrsn=d8302788_7)
An Alternate Course for Microsoft Teams Users
If you are worried about the business impact of an outage or service disruption, you may consider adopting some other more established unified communications solutions that offer financially-backed 99.999% uptime SLA's. For instance, RingCentral offers a Microsoft Teams integration that allows collaboration and sharing across the RingCentral platform, and allows chats, messaging and file sharing to continue normally even during an occasional Teams outage.
For more information about Microsoft Teams or the ideal cloud communications deployment for your enterprise organization, check out our Microsoft page or reach out to us directly.
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy:
