Microsoft Users Hit by An Hours-Long Outage

Microsoft Corp's MS Teams chat application was restored for some users on Thursday, the company said, following an hours-long outage that affected thousands of customers. According to Downdetector.com, which analyses outages by compiling status updates from various sources, including user-submitted faults, there were over 4,800 cases of customers reporting problems with Microsoft Teams.

However, the company did not specify how many users were affected by the outage. "We're receiving many reports that users are able to access Microsoft Teams, and many functions are beginning to recover," the company said.

MS Teams is used by corporate employees all over the world to communicate internally, message one another, make calls, and organize their workflow. The company revealed in a tweet that the Teams integration has had a downstream impact on multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Microsoft Word, Office Online, and SharePoint Online.

"We've taken action to reroute a portion of traffic to provide some relief within the environment," it said.

Other major technology companies have also experienced outages in the last year, with a nearly six-hour outage at Meta Platforms last October keeping WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger out of reach for billions of users.