Microsoft is investigating an outage that left thousands of users around the world unable to access website services, including Teams and Outlook.
He didn’t say how many were affected, but Downdetector.com, which tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, has recorded thousands of people reporting issues with Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Xbox Live.
It showed there were around 4,992 incidents of people reporting issues with the Outlook messaging platform in the UK as of 8am today – and 2,173 with Teams.
Users in areas such as Manchester, London, Birmingham, Norwich, Oxford, Brighton and Cardiff were reporting issues.
The site also reported over 3,900 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft Teams in India and over 900 in Japan. Outage reports have also increased in other countries, including Australia and the United Arab Emirates.
During the outage, most users were unable to message, join calls or use Team app features, forcing office workers to return to in-person meetings and use other media platforms social media to communicate with each other.
Microsoft tweeted: “We are investigating issues affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services. More information can be found in the admin center under MO502273.
“We have identified a potential network issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine next steps for troubleshooting.”
He later added, “We have isolated the network configuration issues issue and are analyzing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing further impact.
“We have rolled back a network change that we believe has an impact. We are monitoring service as the rollback takes effect.”
Microsoft’s cloud unit Azure also tweeted about the outage and said a subset of users were experiencing issues with the platform.
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Many Microsoft users posted on social media to share updates on the disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as the hashtag on Twitter.
“Microsoft Teams and Outlook are having issues here in Ethiopia… are these services down? one tweeted.
Another wrote: “Microsoft Outlook, Teams services in Sri Lanka and worldwide.”
Microsoft Teams is used by more than 280 million people worldwide and is an essential part of the day-to-day operations of businesses and schools who use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organize their workflow.
Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were also among the affected services, according to the company’s status page.
The outage comes after Microsoft – which employs more than 220,000 people including 6,000 in the UK – last week announced plans to 10,000 job cuts through its global operations.
In a memo to employees, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said the layoffs, affecting less than 5% of the workforce, were the result of a drop in investment amid fears the United States and other key growth markets are heading into a recession.
