Microsoft is investigating an ongoing and widespread outage impacting the users of its Teams communication platform and causing connectivity issues, login problems, and message delays.

While Redmond is still working on addressing these ongoing problems, it revealed that a networking issue might be the root cause of this outage.

"We've identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we're performing a failover to remediate impact. Additional information can be found under TM710344 in the admin center," tweeted the official Microsoft account for updates on Microsoft 365 service incidents. 

Affected customers have reported login and server connection issues, desktop and mobile Teams apps freezing on the loading screen, and message delivery problems.

Other reports mention chat history not being available and images no longer displaying in chat, as well as being left in the waiting room after joining Teams meetings.

We're investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features. Further details can be found under TM710344 in the admin center.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) January 26, 2024

On impacted systems, customers see "We've run into a server error. Some functions might not work right now but you can continue to use the app" errors.

According to the TM710344 incident report in the Microsoft 365 admin center, the outage was first acknowledged by Redmond at 10:37 AM EST and it impacts customers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa regions.

The outage affects users performing a cold boot, who may not be able to log into teams and will see an "oops" page. It also causes users attempting to log into their accounts and unlocking devices to see missing messages.

Other scenarios experienced by impacted customers can lead to:

• Users may fail to load messages in channels and chats
• Users are unable to view or download their media (images, videos, audio, call recordings, code snippets)
• Some messages may experience delays being sent
• Call Recordings might take longer to appear in user's OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
• Bots may be unable to download attachments
• Sending and receiving read receipt notifications may be delayed

"Our review of service telemetry indicates a portion of database infrastructure that facilitates multiple APls is experiencing a networking issue, resulting in impact," Microsoft said.

"We're continuing our investigation to isolate the underlying cause of the networking issue and develop remediation actions."

Update January 26, 12:55 EST: Added TM710344 incident report info.

Update January 26, 13:28 EST: Microsoft says it's working on addressing the server issues and is seeing signs of improvement.

"We've completed the failover in the EMEA region and service telemetry is showing some improvement. The failovers for the North and South America regions are ongoing and we continue to monitor," the company tweeted.