Microsoft 365 services witness outage, company says 'issue resolved'

Microsoft Corp on Friday resolved an issue impacting its Azure cloud computing service and other platforms, including workplace messaging app Teams, Dynamics, and Xbox Live. According to a press release issued by the American tech giant, some users reported an outage between approximately 21:30 UTC and 22:30 UTC on April 1. The company has said that the issue has been resolved and all services are back to normal. The outage occurred due to an issue pertaining to DNS (Domain Name System). 

Late last night, Microsoft said it is aware of an issue where users may be unable to access Microsoft 365 services and features, adding “We'll provide additional information as soon as possible”. Later, the company acknowledged a DNS outage and confirmed that the issue has been resolved. Microsoft rerouted its “resilient DNS capabilities”, which saw some improvement in service availability. 

What is DNS?

Domain Name System (DNS) is vital to the internet because it works as a directory to match a domain name with an IP address just as in a phone book, where the name of a person is used to find their phone number. DNS looks for the correct server on the internet when a user types in the name of a website and then connects them quickly. The DNS outage at Microsoft was caused after their servers witnessed a spike in DNS traffic. Microsoft has said that the company is investigating the underlying cause of the outage. 

“We’ve successfully resolved the issue that was causing residual impact for SharePoint Online and we’ve confirmed that all Microsoft 365 services have returned to a healthy state. We apologize for the impact caused by this outage. We are continuing to investigate to establish the root cause and additional preliminary details will be published in the next 24 hours,” Microsoft said in a statement.

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