Microsoft 365 Services Outage Has Been Mitigated, Company Says

Microsoft said on Thursday it has resolved an issue with its Microsoft 365 services and features, including workplace messaging app Teams and Azure, after many users were unable to access them.

Microsoft said in its status page that the Domain Name System (DNS) issue was resolved and that all Microsoft 365 services had returned to a healthy state.

DNS is effectively an address book of the internet which enables computers to match website addresses with the correct server.

Earlier, outage tracking website Downdetector showed over 8,000 incidents of people reporting issues with its widely-used Teams workplace messaging app.

Downdetector only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

In other Microsoft-related news, the company announced that it won a Pentagon contract for augmented reality headgear for soldiers worth $21.88 billion (Rs. 1,60,290 crores) over the next decade, the company and the US military announced Wednesday.

The headsets, based on commercially available HoloLens, will make soldiers safer and more effective, according to Microsoft technical fellow Alex Kipman.

The Department of Defense (DoD) said the production agreement is for five years with a renewal option - that could make the contract worth "in excess of $21.88 billion (Rs. 1,60,290 crores)" over 10 years, a Pentagon official said in a statement.

Microsoft will rapidly start producing the so-called Integrated Augmentation System under the contract.

The award aims "to deliver next-generation night vision and situational awareness capabilities to the Close Combat Force at the speed of relevance," the Pentagon said.

A head-mounted display used by soldiers for battle and training employs sensors for night and thermal vision in addition to providing data for help in engaging targets and making tactical decisions, officials said.

"The programme delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios," Kipman said in a blog post.

The contract shows that Microsoft can make money from its augmented reality offerings with the military and likely heralds expanded uses by private businesses as well as consumers, according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.

"The second and potentially most important point is this deal just further drills in the narrative that Microsoft is tightening its grip on deals within the DoD and Pentagon," Ives said in a note to investors.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

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