Germany is investigating a Microsoft outage that affected users around the world today.
The Interior Ministry said the country’s cyber security office was investigating to identify possible culprits behind the attack.
“The scope and source of these attacks are currently being clarified,” a spokesperson said.
The company has not disclosed how many were affected, but Downdetector.com, which tracks outages, recorded thousands of people reporting problems with Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365, and XBox Live.
It showed that 4,992 incidents had been reported with the Outlook email platform in the UK as of 8am today, and 2,173 with Teams.
Users in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Norwich, Oxford, Brighton and Cardiff reported problems.
Later in the morning, Downdetector showed that the number of reports had dropped considerably.
“We continue to monitor recovery across the service with some customers reporting mitigation,” the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account reported.
“We are also connecting the service to additional infrastructure to speed up the recovery process.”
Reports of outages for Teams were also identified in other countries, including India, Japan, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Many users were unable to exchange messages, join calls, or use any features of the Teams app, forcing office workers to communicate in other ways.
Teams is used by more than 280 million people around the world and is an essential part of the daily operations of companies and schools, who use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organize their workflow.
Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were also affected, according to the company’s status page.
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The company’s cloud unit Azure also tweeted about the outage, saying a subset of users had experienced issues with the platform.
Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and more than 500 million active users, revealed on its status page that its services were affected worldwide.
The disruption comes after Microsoft, which employs more than 220,000 people including 6,000 in the UK, announced plans last week to make 10,000 job cuts at its global operations.
