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 affected Microsoft 365 products including Outlook and Microsoft Teams, beginning shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time. The company said on Twitter at around 5 a.m. ET that it had “isolated the issue into a network configuration issue.”
At 7:45 am, the company said all its services are already available.
These programs are important for many businesses that temporarily do not have key communications services. The company did not say how many users were affected, but Thousands of people reported power outageswith some people talking on social media.
Microsoft announced its latest quarterly earnings on Tuesday, reports slowest growth in six years, with profits down 12% and sales up 2% from a year earlier; both numbers fell below Wall Street expectations. The earnings report comes after the tech giant said it was investing “many years, billions of dollars” in OpenAI, the startup that designed the chatbot. ChatGPTlike Microsoft seeks to push artificial intelligence technology further and compete with the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google.
The company announced last week that it would lay off 10,000 employees, less than five percent of its payroll.
