Microsoft Teams suffers its second outage this month

Microsoft Teams has suffered a global outage for the second time this month that is preventing users from sending messages and logging in to the service.

The tech giant confirmed the issue on Twitter and said it was currently investigating the root cause.

The issue, which is throwing up a 401 error code, is preventing users from accessing the service via the web and blocking messaging systems on the app itself. Some have managed to log in, but Microsoft has warned that they might experience "degraded performance with multiple features".

"We've confirmed that this issue affects users globally," says Microsoft's 365 status account on Twitter. "We're reviewing monitoring telemetry and recent changes to isolate the source of the issue."

The problems began around 10:30am BST, according to DownDetector, with login and server issues the most commonly cited by users. Other Microsoft services, such as Azure and Xbox have so far been unaffected, but with the pandemic still lingering and many still working from home, the outage is causing trouble for many in the UK and around the world - including Doncaster's local planning committee.

"Unfortunately due to global issues with Microsoft Teams today's scheduled Planning Committee is cancelled," the organisation said on Twitter. "The meeting will be rearranged in due course, we will share details of the new date once it becomes available."

Since, Microsoft has said that it's identified the root cause of the issue and "performed mitigation actions".

"We’re seeing signs of recovery and will continue to monitor the service," the company added. "Users still experiencing impact should restart their clients to expedite recovery. Further details can be found under TM252802.

This is the second outage Teams has suffered in April and the third its experienced in the past two months. In March, users lost four hours of usage after an authentication change knocked out access to the comms platform. That coincided with an Azure Active Directory outage that impacted Office web apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other Microsoft services.

IT Pro has approached Microsoft for details and will update this article when more information is released.