Microsoft Reports Issues With Joining Teams Meetings

The widely used Microsoft Teams collaboration app suffered an issue Thursday morning that prevented some North American users from joining meetings.

Microsoft acknowledged the issue in a tweet from the Microsoft 365 Status account at 11:31 a.m. Eastern Time Thursday.

[Related: ‘Very Frustrating’: Microsoft Office 365 Outage Hits U.S. Again]

“We’re investigating an issue with joining meetings in Microsoft Teams for users in North America,” the Microsoft account said in the tweet.

Just after noon ET on Thursday, the account tweeted that Microsoft has “identified a drop in availability for the service that facilitates meeting join functionality.”

In a statement to CRN Thursday afternoon, Microsoft said that “we resolved the short interruption that a subset of customers in North America may have experienced connecting to meetings or live events.”

Teams—which is part of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of productivity apps—has become an essential tool for countless businesses in North America since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread shift to remote work. Microsoft disclosed in late October that Teams had reached 115 million daily active users worldwide.

On Thursday morning, an outage map on downdetector.com showed the Teams issues affecting users in numerous major cities in the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Seattle and Boston.

Based on user-submitted reports on the site, it appears that the issues began around 10 a.m. ET and escalated at around 11 a.m.

The issues follow a series of three Office 365 outages in 10 days last fall, which affected Teams, Outlook and other productivity apps.