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| Microsoft announces the cause of the global Microsoft 365 outage |
Microsoft revealed the cause of the Microsoft 365 desktop app outage that affected users around the world and lasted about five hours last Wednesday.
The US tech giant said the outage was caused by a change in the router's Internet Protocol (IP) address, which was causing problems forwarding packets between other routers on its WAN.
Microsoft said at the time that the outage occurred after a (WAN) update caused configuration problems for DNS (Domain Name System) networks and that users of WANs (Wide Area Network) in all affected regions had problems accessing Microsoft services. 365 affected.
The service experienced wave after wave of outages, peaking at about every 30 minutes, according to the Microsoft Azure service status page, which was also affected because it showed an intermittent error: (504 Gateway Timeout).
The list of services affected by the outage includes: (Microsoft Teams), (Exchange Online), (Outlook), (SharePoint), (OneDrive for Business), (PowerBi), (Microsoft 365 Admin Center), (Microsoft Graph), (Microsoft Intune), (Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps), and (Microsoft Defender for Identity).
In total, between 07:05 GMT (the investigation began) and the service recovery (00:43 GMT), Microsoft spent more than five hours trying to resolve the issue.
Microsoft has now come forward saying that the problem was caused by changing the router's IP address on the WAN using a command that was not fully tested and did not behave differently on different network devices.
As part of the planned change to update IP addresses in WAN routers, a command to the router sent messages to all other routers in the WAN, which led to a recalculation of the affinity table and during the reset process, she added. Because of this, the routers did not properly forward the packets that passed through them."
After the incident, Microsoft said it will now prevent high-impact commands from being executed and will also require that all commands follow security configuration change instructions.