Microsoft Outlook and Teams Are Back Online After Morning Outages

Microsoft restored access to its email and video conferencing tools on Wednesday after thousands of users were unable to connect to the services for hours.

The outage, which affected Microsoft 365 products including Outlook and Microsoft Teams, began shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time. The company said on Twitter around 5 a.m. Eastern time that it had “isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue.”

At 7:45 a.m., the company said all of its services were available.

The programs are crucial for many businesses, who were temporarily left without key communication services. The company did not say how many users were affected, but thousands of people reported outages, with some people grousing on social media.

Microsoft announced its latest quarterly earnings on Tuesday, reporting its slowest growth in six years, with profit falling 12 percent and revenue rising 2 percent from a year earlier; both figures fell below Wall Street expectations. The earnings report came after the tech giant said it was making a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI, the start-up that designed the chatbot ChatGPT, as Microsoft seeks to push artificial intelligence technology further and compete with rivals like Amazon, Apple and Google.

The company announced last week that it would lay off 10,000 employees, less than five percent of its payroll.