Microsoft services including Teams and Outlook down for thousands

Service interruptions reported around the world

Microsoft is looking into an outage that has prevented thousands of users worldwide from using its services, including Teams and Outlook.

The company did not provide information on how many users were impacted, but outage tracking website Downdetector revealed that more than 5,000 users in the UK had reported issues with email service Outlook, alone.

According to Sky News, users in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Norwich, Brighton and Cardiff were reporting issues.

More than 3,900 incidents have been reported in India, and nearly 900 in Japan - where it is currently the evening. Users in Australia and the United Arab Emirates are also said to be experiencing similar issues.

Xbox Live, Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are among the services reported to be down.

Microsoft acknowledged it was aware of the issues using its Microsoft 365 Twitter account.

'We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps,' the company wrote.

It later claimed to have 'isolated the problem to networking configuration issues' and said it was analysing the best mitigation strategy to resolve the issue without causing further disruption.

In another tweet, Microsoft said that it had 'rolled back a network change' it believed was causing the problems.

'We're monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect.'

Azure, Microsoft's cloud division, also tweeted about the networking issue, saying a minority of customers were affected.

As a result of the outage, most users on Microsoft Teams were unable to send and receive messages, join calls or utilise other features of the Team app, forcing office employees to revert to in-person meetings or connect through other alternative platforms.

More than 280 million people use Microsoft Teams worldwide, mostly in enterprises and educational institutions, where it is used for calls, meetings and general service organisation.

Commenting on the outage Matthew Hodgson, co-founder of decentralised British messaging app Element, said: "Teams regularly suffers major service interruptions, which forces businesses to fall back on cumbersome email - except now, Outlook has also failed. This means users are likely falling back on to centralised vendor-owned consumer-grade comms apps like WhatsApp where sensitive discussions will be on Facebook-owned servers, leaving businesses with no control over how its data is stored, managed or accessed."