communication was tricky for thousands of people today as Microsoft teams went down for many users the workplace chat and video conferencing service experienced issues in a number of places around the world including here in the GTA with more on the issues let's go live to our Amar Khan in our Newsroom Amar we were not immune to the issues either no Tracy shalima an outage that was and is being felt here at Global News 2 where we rely on Tech Giants Microsoft software across the company now throughout the globe the Microsoft teams chats were a little or a lot more quiet today the workspace chat in video conferencing service started experiencing issues in various regions of the world earlier in the day Microsoft one of the tech giant saw its workplace software grow over the course of the pandemic to over 280 million users on the platform many of these range from small businesses to large with thousands of employees now not being able able to access calendars chats and notifications for their work on downdetector.com which tracks Tech outages close to 15,000 incidents were logged of the outage indicating that the applications were either taking too long to load inoperable at all or users were unable to see notifications Microsoft acknowledged the outage on X before noon saying that they are experiencing challenges in many different regions and in North and South America the problems persist with a software being used by hundreds of millions of users tech experts say this is the challenge of dealing with network software outages like this remind us just how incredibly dependent on these tools we have become and just how vulnerable we are when these tools go down and most organizations sign up for them get their users working on it and then forget about it they don't talk about Plan B they don't talk about how they're going to remain productive and connected and collaborative when these systems go down and it's a matter of when not if uh and so companies I think should use this experience as an opportunity to about their Disaster Recovery plans so so for some people it's the end of the week deadlines that will go missed or delayed with the software down Microsoft says they are beginning to see more users return to service and will continue to work towards getting everyone up and running soon Tracy okay armar thank you