One router, one command, one global afternoon of silence
January 2023 Microsoft 365 outage took down Teams, Outlook and OneDrive worldwide
The market's verdict: +2.4% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
On January 25, 2023, a five hour global outage took out Teams, Outlook, Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive, which in the remote work era is most of the working world. The root cause, per Microsoft's own incident report, was a single unvalidated command that changed an IP address on one WAN router, after which the network spent hours discovering new and worse routes for everything. Microsoft rolled the change back the same day and promised that highly impactful commands would be blocked in future. Somewhere a router is still proud of what it did.
This one is officially acknowledged.
Links
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Impact
- BleepingComputer (publication)
- The Guardian (publication)
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Context
- BBC News (publication)
↳ caused by WAN router IP change (incident MO502273)
Timeline
- Jan 25, 2023 Fixed Microsoft shipped a fix.