14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Teams experienced an outage earlier today, and by the looks of things, the one to blame is none other than Microsoft itself.
The software giant explained on Twitter that Microsoft Teams went offline because of an expired security certificate, confirming that users trying to log in would get nothing more than an error telling them the connection wasn’t possible.
“We've determined that an authentication certificate has expired causing, users to have issues using the service. We're developing a fix to apply a new certificate to the service which will remediate impact. Further updates can be found under TM202916 in the admin center,” Microsoft said in the original statement after acknowledging the issue.
“We've initiated the deployment of the updated certificate and are monitoring service health as the fix progresses,” it said one hour later.
Microsoft has already corrected the problem, and Microsoft Teams should now be working correctly for everyone, with the company confirming on Twitter a few hours ago that everything should be back to normal. The outage lasted for approximately three hours.
“We successfully deployed the fix to the affected infrastructure and conducted additional remediation actions to resolve the issue,” it says.
Microsoft versus Slack
According to a report from SeekingAlpha, the outage experienced by Microsoft Team was good news for competitors, who benefited from the downtime with a stock increase. Slack, for example, gained 0.9%, while Peers Zoom Video Communications increased 14.7%.
Microsoft Teams and Slack are currently fierce rivals in this market, with the Redmond-based software giant claiming in late 2019 that it reached 20 million daily users. Microsoft’s announcement generated an 8.4% drop for Slack, as the company previously reported “only” 12 million daily active users one month before Microsoft.
The software firm, however, puts a lot of effort into improving Microsoft Teams, so blunders like an expired certificate shouldn’t by any means happen.