Understanding the Microsoft Outage: Why Were Azure, Microsoft Teams, & Outlook Down? | Outage Deep Dive

The Internet Report

At around 7:05 a.m. UTC on January 25, 2023, Microsoft started experiencing service related issues. At the same time, ThousandEyes observed BGP withdrawals and a significant number of route changes that resulted in a high amount of packet loss, ultimately affecting various services like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and others.

00:00 Welcome: This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. Join our co-hosts Angelique Medina, Head of Internet Intelligence, and Kemal Santja, Principal Internet Architect, both from ThousandEyes, as they discuss the January 25, 2023 Microsoft outage.

00:43 Incident overview as seen in the ThousandEyes platform. Follow along in the ThousandEyes platform *no login required*: https://acimfsmgobnxgdkltxicdesijrowimst.share.thousandeyes.com

10:18 Why would rapid announcement changes cause packet loss at the scale that was observed during this event?

12:35 What should someone make of the length / duration of the event?

14:28 Why would the change of an IP address on a router cause such a major connectivity disruption?

23:37 What are some of the lessons you can learn from this event?

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