Xbox, Outlook and Teams down: Microsoft hit by huge outage as online servers not working

Xbox Live, Outlook, Microsoft Teams and more are down in a major outage.

The problems also hit Microsoft Azure, its its cloud computing platform, which means the effects of the technical problems could be felt on other websites and servers that do not appear to be connected to Microsoft.

The company’s status pages initially appeared to indicate that the company did not see a problem, at the time of publication. But the Microsoft 365 Twitter account confirmed that it was aware of issues.

It said that it had “isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue, and we are analysing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing additional impact”.

The problems with Teams and Outlook came at the beginning of the work day. Both are used by hundreds of millions of people, across business and schools, who rely on the service for making calls and sharing information.

Tracking website DownDetector recorded complaints from thousands of users, with issues registered across Microsoft’s products.

The outage appeared to be affecting users across the world, though Microsoft’s official updates suggested that some might still be able to get online.

The problems come less than a day after Microsoft announced its results for the latest quarter. They showed that despite revenue being up slightly, its net income dropped by 12 per cent – and much of the revenue came from the company’s cloud services.

In advance of those poor results, Microsoft had said that it was laying off 10,000 employees as part of broader cost-cutting measures.