Mega outage at Microsoft!

Apparently, the software developer has been having technical problems with their services, such as Outlook or Teams. Game servers, such as those for the computer game Minecraft, or live access to Microsoft’s Xbox console, were also affected.

In the meantime, the glitch appears to have been largely resolved, but issues can crop up again and again throughout the course of the day.

Users around the world were unable to access emails or video conferences on Wednesday, data from Downdetector.com showed. In countries like Germany or India, several thousand users reported difficulties. At the Portal of Disruption “all disturbances” there were also thousands of problem reports.

Microsoft announced that the cause would be investigated. The company later identified a network configuration issue as the cause of the outage. The group announced on Twitter that it had reverted a change that, according to prior knowledge, had caused the outage.

Errors when changing network settings have repeatedly caused large-scale failures in the past.

The company itself did not disclose the number of users affected by the outage, but in addition to Germany and the US, further outages were also reported in Australia, Great Britain, India and the United Arab Emirates.

The group’s internal offerings are not only based on Microsoft cloud services such as Azure, but many new and large companies also use them for their operations.

The Teams communication program has grown significantly in recent years and is constantly setting new user records. In 2022, around 270 million people were working with the software.

During the outage, most users were unable to exchange messages, participate in calls, or use other features of the Teams app.

The global disruption comes just days after the tech group announced a massive layoff: The software giant plans to lay off 10,000 employees in the coming months. Microsoft had already laid off several employees in two rounds last year.

Microsoft announced its business figures on Wednesday night, announcing that Office 365 now has 63.2 million subscribers.