Outlook: are Hotmail email, Microsoft Office 365 and Teams still down in the UK, issues and outage explained - news

Microsoft is looking into an outage that left thousands of customers worldwide unable to access services like Teams and Outlook.

The company has not specified how many of its users were impacted, but Downdetector.com, which records such outages using a variety of sources, noted that thousands of individuals had reported issues with Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365, and Xbox Live on the morning of Wednesday 25 January.

The issues also seemed to affect Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, meaning even servers and websites that don’t seem to be associated with Microsoft could have been impacted.

The company said it has received reports that the following services had been affected: Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Graph.

What caused the issues and outages?

Most users were unable to communicate with one another, participate in calls, or utilise any capabilities of Teams during the outage. With more than 280 million users worldwide, the application is an essential part of corporate and educational operations.

“We’ve identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps,” Microsoft 365 Status, an account showing updates on Microsoft 365 service incidents, tweeted.

It later added: “We’ve isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue, and we are analysing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing additional impact. We’ll provide more information once we have additional information.”

Users in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Norwich, Oxford, Brighton, and Cardiff, among other places, reported issues.

Is the issue fixed?

At 9.26am, Microsoft 365 Status tweeted: “We’ve rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact. We’re monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect.”

It later added that some customers had seen improvements as a result: “We’re continuing to monitor the recovery across the service and some customers are reporting mitigation,” it tweeted. “We’re also connecting the service to additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process.”

Earlier this month, Microsoft became one of a raft of international tech companies to announce mass staff layoffs, in response to post-Covid economic slowdown. The company said “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities” were to blame for 10,000 jobs - almost 5% of its workforce - being axed.

Microsoft joined a raft of rivals, such as Amazon and Facebook owner Meta, in trimming their workforces on fears of a slowdown in demand as the US and global economy slows.