When Microsoft Teams Fails: Vantage DX Early Warning of Microsoft Incident TM917749
Outages
On October 24, 2024, at approximately 6:12 pm EDT, Martello’s Microsoft Teams monitoring solution, Vantage DX, detected issues with Microsoft Teams across multiple customers.
Nearly three hours later, at 9:05 pm, Microsoft confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that there were reports of potential problems with the service.
What Issues Were Users Experiencing?
According to Microsoft incident TM917749, customers reported, among other issues, difficulties with:
- Creating new group chats and meetings
- Sending and posting instant messages
- Escalating one-on-one calls
Vantage DX synthetic testing robots proactively identified these issues before user reports of problems began to flow into IT teams and Microsoft. These robots continuously simulate Teams user behaviors, and track how long it takes to complete various tasks, like posting instant messages. This Vantage DX screenshot shows that instant messages began to intermittently fail at 6:12pm EDT, and then recovered at 8:57pm EDT.
Scope of the Problem
Vantage DX confirmed that these issues were due to a Microsoft service degradation, not other potential issues like local or ISP network disruptions. Leveraging AI-based anomaly detection, Vantage DX determined the root cause to the problem was within the Microsoft service itself. Additionally, Vantage DX provided customers with insights into which of their locations were affected, vital given that Microsoft’s infrastructure is regionally segmented, meaning issues aren’t always global.
With this information, IT teams were able to proactively inform users of the outage and initiate resiliency plans, avoiding unnecessary troubleshooting of issues beyond their control.
At 9:42pm EDT, Microsoft published an update to this incident indicating that a routine change had encountered a deployment issue resulting in the incident. They redeployed the change and were starting to see relief of the issue – but Vantage DX customers already knew that!
Limited Impact – This Time
Fortunately, the service degradation during today’s Microsoft Teams outage was relatively limited compared to previous incidents. It took place after hours for many regions and lasted just around three hours. However, earlier this year, we’ve seen more prolonged outages that significantly disrupted businesses. During those incidents, many IT teams found themselves unprepared, scrambling for answers as issues spread across their organization.
Don’t let this happen to you— check out this demo to discover how Vantage DX provides early warnings to help you stay ahead of outages and ensure business continuity. Get your Free Microsoft Outage Readiness assessment today.
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See how Vantage DX provides early alerts so your IT team can spring into action, deploy backup plans, and notify users, avoiding the chaos of troubleshooting an unfixable problem.
