On August 19, Microsoft Teams users started having trouble joining Teams meetings. Microsoft has acknowledged this issue with an incident report.
According to Microsoft incident TM220645, all users had trouble connecting to meetings hosted in the U.S. Additionally, hosts had trouble adding participants to, or initiating recordings for, Teams meetings.
Why were you having trouble joining Microsoft Teams meetings?
The cause of this incident seems to be a massive increase in traffic across North America. Microsoft has routed traffic in an effort to stave off any further problems. For now they appear to have resolved the issue.
A nice problem for Microsoft to have?
The dramatic increase in traffic supports the ever-growing popularity of Teams as a collaboration and communication tool. Since the beginning of the year, when COVID-19 forced millions of workers to virtual offices, the number of daily active Teams users has risen to over 100 million as of August (according to some reports)—up from 75 million back in April.
Microsoft has made big investments in establishing Teams as the flagship entry point to help employees stay connected and engaged in the digital workplace. “Incident TM220645” is a sign that Teams is becoming the go-to solution for collaboration for organizations looking to technology to help them ensure business continuity.
Microsoft is continuing to watch this issue closely, and will likely move to increase hardware and resources to ensure users can continue to connect to their Teams meetings. We’ll continue to monitor this situation as well and report any additional findings. (And if you have questions about how your organization can #UseTeamsBetter, feel free to reach out anytime.)