One of the most fascinating things about tech industry is that we know it can be the most advanced and bring the innovations that we have never heard of. However, on the other hand, we will see some of the most common and bizarre mistakes that would make people laugh at them as well. Now, one such incident happened at Microsoft yesterday when it was realized that its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, went down for all users at a time. Now, most of the people assumed that it would be because the Teams’ servers went down or something. But the reason is bizarre and you would find it funny as well.
Well, the Microsoft Teams service went down for everyone because Microsoft forgot to renew its SSL certificate. Yes, as funny as it sounds, it is a fact and we know this due to various reports that have confirmed it. Basically, what happens is that SSL is a security layer which is seen from https:// in any URL. For those who don’t have an SSL certificate, the URL would start with http://
Since Microsoft Teams has an SSL certificate and it expired, the URL dropped from https:// to http:// which obviously took the servers down since https: was not available. This is also a reminder that Microsoft has employees working for them who are humans as well and everyone makes mistakes. However, this should be looked at by Microsoft since there would be at least one of the employees who is responsible for renewing the certificates who failed to do so.
As per a report, Microsoft Teams remained down for three hours but it was back online for everyone by noon since the certificate was renewed immediately as soon as the mistake was realized. Also, this is not the first case of services going down due to SSL certificate renewal and we believe this will not be the last.