Microsoft Forgets to Renew Certificate, Teams Goes Offline

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If you woke up this morning and are unable to sign in to Microsoft Teams, you are not alone. Microsoft’s productivity application was unavailable for many users but the outage does not appear to be a serious threat to the service.

Microsoft acknowledged that Teams was offline because they let a certificate expire. Admins looking for more information can find updates under TM202916 and a fix is currently being deployed; this outage impacts users who have authentication tokens that have expired and/or first-boot users.

While this downtime is not a result of a major infrastructure outage, for customers, it doesn’t really matter why you can’t access Teams data; if it’s offline, so is your productivity. And of course for Microsoft, this is an embarrassing mistake as certificate renewal is an easy process but in this case, it’s likely that the steps were simply overlooked.

As Microsoft continues to push Teams to help it move more customers to the platform, outages like this will have an impact on the reputation of the service. But, it’s important to point out that these outages are more the exception than the rule.

Teams is a good tool for enabling productivity and collaboration inside your organization. Companies all around the globe are adopting the platform as there are real, tangible, benefits from using Teams but when you can’t access your data, it reveals the vulnerability of depending on another vendor for your operations.

All this being said, Microsoft’s cloud is typically far more reliable than a traditional on-premises operation. But, that doesn’t make it any easier when users are flooding the support lines because they can’t access their files/meetings/communication tools.