TOPLINE
Microsoft on Wednesday said it is investigating after an outage took down a number of its platforms around the world, leaving thousands of users locked out of services including Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Xbox Live.
Microsoft did not reveal the scale of the disruption but said the outage has affected many of its services including Teams, Outlook, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Graph.
Thousands of users in countries including India, the U.K., Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Japan began reporting difficulties accessing Microsoft services from around 2:30 a.m. ET, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Microsoft Azure, the firm’s cloud computing platform, and GitHub, one of the most popular code-hosting sites on the web, also appeared to be hit by the outage, according to Downdetector reports.
KEY BACKGROUND
Microsoft’s products are used by businesses around the world and many are absolutely critical to day-to-day business operations. Teams, a messaging and communication service, is used by more than 280 million people worldwide and Outlook is one of the world’s most popular email clients. The impact on Azure, a key revenue driver for Microsoft, could mean the disruption is felt further afield from sites using the cloud computing service. The firm said it plans to cut 10,000 jobs in mid-January ahead of revealing lackluster earnings amid slower corporate sales and declining demand.
FURTHER READING
Microsoft Erases Gains After Saying Azure Growth to Decelerate(Bloomberg)
By Robert Hart, Forbes Staff