Service degradation: Unable to insert assets in PowerPoint, Word and Outlook in West Europe (Production 0)

Update timeline

1. identified Oct 29, 2025, 03:13 PM UTC

   We have identified an issue that affects a subset of customers and are working towards a resolution. Further updates will be posted here soon.

2. identified Oct 29, 2025, 04:50 PM UTC

   The engineering team has provided a solution, but they are blocked from releasing it because of the major Microsoft Azure outage.

3. resolved Oct 29, 2025, 08:55 PM UTC

   The incident has been resolved, and further information will be provided in a postmortem shortly. We apologize for the impact to affected customers.

4. postmortem Oct 31, 2025, 02:25 PM UTC

   **Investigation** On October 29, 2025, at **11:59 AM CET**, an issue began affecting customers in the Hive environment on **West Europe \(Production 0\)**. Users were unable to insert non-dynamic assets such as PowerPoint slides, Word templates, and Outlook assets in Office applications. The issue was **detected at 3:38 PM CET**, prompting an immediate investigation. Initial analysis focused on recent deployments and configuration changes in the asset insertion workflows. The engineering team identified that a recent update to the **UI/UX experience in the asset browsing functionality** had introduced a configuration that caused non-dynamic assets to be processed incorrectly, leading to the observed behavior. **Mitigation** Once the cause was identified, the engineering team initiated work to **correct the build configuration** and restore expected behavior. The process was temporarily delayed due to an **overlapping Microsoft Azure outage**, which impacted build and release pipelines and slowed deployment activities. Despite this external delay, the team worked diligently to validate and prepare the fix as soon as Azure services became stable again, minimizing downtime for affected customers. **Resolution** After Azure services were fully operational, the engineering team deployed the **corrected build configuration**, which restored proper handling of non-dynamic assets. By **10:00 PM CET on October 29, 2025**, full functionality was confirmed restored for all affected tenants in **West Europe \(Production 0\)**. Following the resolution, validation tests confirmed that asset insertion in PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook was functioning normally. **Post-Incident Actions** To strengthen reliability and prevent similar issues, the following actions are being implemented: 1. **Improve test coverage** across UI/UX asset management workflows. 2. **Separate GA and experimental UI/UX components** to isolate risks during development. 3. **Establish better local test environments** for VSTO and preview engine scenarios. 4. **Enhance integration testing readiness** to ensure all tenant configurations can be validated before release. **Impact and Scope** The incident affected customers hosted in **West Europe \(Production 0\)** using the Hive environment. Some users experienced errors or were unable to insert assets in Office applications until the configuration was corrected and services were fully restored. The issue was contained to this cluster and did not affect other production environments. We sincerely apologize for the disruption this caused. Maintaining a reliable and seamless user experience is our highest priority. We are taking the above steps to ensure stronger safeguards in testing and deployment processes to prevent recurrence of similar issues.