Mondays, man! Microsoft Teams went down for nearly three hours as a result of an embarrassing oversight. The company forgot to renew a critical security certificate.
Teams has now become the flagship Office hub software for the technology titan, and the company has even started running TV commercials for the service.
But the company confirmed that Teams went down just after 9AM ET, and then quickly followed up with the source of the issue.
An authentication certificate expired, causing users to have issues when using the service. Surprising, when you consider the company develops software like System Center Operations Manager that is designed to monitor for events like certificate expiration.
Users were met with error messages when they attempted to sign into the service on Monday morning, and they were instead greeted with a notification that the app had failed to establish an HTTPS connection to Microsoft servers.
Microsoft later on revealed that the fix was successfully deployed later in the day.
The rising Slack competitor has some 20 million users, and this preventable outage is about as awkward as it comes. Redmond has not apologized to its user base, but the company will definitely do some digging to find out why this mistake happened.
This is, after all, not the first time that Teams has gone down.
Neither the original occasion of the company failing to renew security certificates. Azure itself went down with a serious outage because of an expired SSL certificate seven years ago.
Still, not the best way to start the year.
