Microsoft explains why Teams, Xbox Live, and Office 365 went down this week
Microsoft published its first report breaking down the major Azure outage from this week.
What you need to know
- Microsoft published a preliminary root cause analysis of the major Azure outage earlier this week.
- The outage affected several Microsoft services, including Teams, Office 365, and Xbox Live.
- An issue related to the rotation of digital keys caused the outage.
Earlier this week, an Azure Active Directory outage caused several major Microsoft services to go down, including Teams, Xbox Live, and Office 365. The outage impacted hundreds of millions of people who rely on the services for work, education, and entertainment. Microsoft recently published a preliminary root cause anaylsis for the outage (via ZDNet.
Here is Microsoft's summary of the cause of the outage:
The crux of the issue was an error surrounding keys. A key was marked as "retain" for longer than normal, which exposed a bug that caused the "retain" state to be ignored. The key was removed when it shouldn't have been, which caused the issues.
Microsoft is working on a multi-phase effort to prevent these types of issues. Right now, Microsoft is in the second phase of that process. Microsoft explains the effort in the same post:
Microsoft outlines its upcoming steps, which should prevent these types of outages once finished. Microsoft has put additional safeguards in place to help prevent outages until the second phase of its effort is complete.
Microsoft will publish a full root cause analysis of the outage once its investigation is complete.
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Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com.