Microsoft Teams was down for four hours Feb. 18 in what appears to be the first significant outage for the business app, according to The Verge.
Four things to know:
1. Teams is a business app that offers workplace chat, meetings, notes and attachment functions on one platform. It's replaced Skype for Business as the main communications tool for Office 365 users and is live at more than 329,000 organizations worldwide.
2. During the Feb. 18 outage, Teams users reported they were having trouble connecting to the chat services. This means many businesses that use the app reverted to relying on other forms of communication, such as email.
3. Microsoft acknowledged the outage in a Feb. 18 statement to The Verge. However, the company did not provide a reason for the incident.
"We can confirm that we have fully resolved connectivity issues that some users may have experienced," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. A Microsoft spokesperson repeated this statement to Becker's Hospital Review Feb. 19.
4. Microsoft has been adding healthcare capabilities to its Teams app in recent months.
In September 2018, the company said it planned to add a care coordination tool that integrates with various EHR systems and enables providers to discuss patient care with secure messaging features. Earlier this month, Microsoft integrated Teams with Redox, an interoperability startup founded by three former Epic engineers, to provide options for clinicians to securely share EHR data with one another.