On Monday, Microsoft reported a massive outage that had affected the company’s cloud services: Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Xbox Live, Exchange Online, Outlook.com, and SharePoint. Microsoft later said it was caused by a configuration issue in their Azure Active Directory.
Since Tuesday, multiple users of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams have been reporting missing files. The file had been deleted and moved to SharePoint’s cloud recycle bin, or in some cases, the user’s PC Recycle Bin.
In the past couple of days, Microsoft SharePoint administrators were bombarded with client calls about missing files in their SharePoint folders.
The admins investigating the issue found the SharePoint folder structure was intact, but all of the files were now located in SharePoint’s cloud recycle bin or PC’s Recycle Bin.
The news was first reported by Lawrence Adams of BleepingComputer after James Watt, an IT consultant from Pennsylvania, US, contacted the cybersecurity blog after getting numerous clients’ calls about the missing files.
Later, BleepingComputer independently found reports about a similar issue with OneDrive files posted online at the Microsoft community forums and Reddit.
“Because the files… were deleted almost at the same time… it would be impossible for a normal user to delete so many files in such a short timeframe. The only way to do that is to delete all folders, but only some files at some folders are deleted,” a SharePoint admin posted to Microsoft’s community forums, looking for help.
Watt contacted Microsoft and was told the issue was related to the Microsoft advisories SP244708 (SharePoint) and OD244709 (OnDrive) which state that local copies of OneDrive for Business or SharePoint files will be restored after a resync. “Subsequent file syncs will restore the files to the appropriate local folders,” Microsoft assured.
They also said the cause for the issues was Monday’s Azure Active Directory (AAD) outage. In addition, admins are not seeing that the files are being restored and resorting to manual restore.
BleepingComputer has enquired Microsoft about this but has not yet received an answer.
Besides SharePoint, numerous Microsoft Teams Free users reported on Microsoft support community the files shared on their channels are no longer there.
Sam Cosby, Microsoft Teams Engineering PM, replied to the post that they were looking into the matter.
“Hi everyone – I just wanted to let you know that I’ve deemed this issue a livesite and have our on-call-engineers looking into this.”
In a later comment, Cosby said they found the cause for the missing files and would be applying fixes soon.
