For years, we’ve been advising organizations using Microsoft 365 services (formerly known as Office 365 services) like Exchange Online to create backups of their data stored in these services and/or to define their exit scenario.

Now, organizations using Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to this purpose are seeing errors with this product…

The situation

An organization leverages Microsoft Teams.

To create backups of their data in Teams and to restore this data and/or other locations, they use Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 version 5.

The issue

Since last week, admins receive an error when creating Teams backups:

Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

The cause

Recent changes made by Microsoft to their application programming interfaces (APIs) have impacted backups of data in Microsoft Teams in versions of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 prior to version 5.0.2.42.

The solution

When using Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, you must upgrade to latest version: Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 5b cumulative patch KB4187 (version 5.0.2.42).

The newest product build leverages different API queries which help to avoid the issue which takes place in older builds.

Concluding

Microsoft 365 is a fluid platform. Changes can be implemented overnight that break functionality in the morning. Unintended, or not. Veeam has been working closely with Microsoft for several years.

Check if you’re running version 5.0.2.42, or a newer version. If not, update your Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 installation(s).