Microsoft restored access to its email and videoconferencing tools on Wednesday after thousands of users were unable to connect to the service for hours.
The outage, which affected Microsoft 365 products including Outlook and Microsoft Teams, occurred shortly after 2 a.m. ET. The company said on Twitter around 5 a.m. ET that it had “identified the issue as a network configuration issue.”
At 7:45am, the company said all of its services were available.
These procedures are critical to many businesses that are temporarily without critical communications services. The company did not say how many users were affected, but thousands reported the outage, and some complained on social media.
Microsoft reported its latest quarterly earnings on Tuesday, reporting its slowest growth in six years, with profits down 12% year-over-year and revenue up 2% year-over-year; both figures fell short of Wall Street expectations. Ahead of the earnings report, the tech giant said it was making a “multi-year, multi-billion-dollar” investment in OpenAI, the startup designing the chatbot ChatGPT, as Microsoft seeks to further push artificial intelligence technology and compete with rivals such as Amazon, Apple Inc. and Google.
The company announced last week that it would lay off 10,000 workers, less than 5% of its payroll.