LONDON: Microsoft Corp on Wednesday said it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe.

Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit.

By late morning Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft WAN.

An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500m active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform.

Businesses have become increasingly dependent on online platforms after the pandemic caused a shift to more employees working from home.

Earlier, Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was occurring with devices across the Microsoft WAN. This impacts connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centres, it said.

Microsoft later tweeted it had rolled back a network change that it believed was causing the issue and was using “additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process”.

Microsoft did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from outage tracking website Down­detector showed thousands of incidents across continents.

During the outage, users faced problems in exchanging messages, joining calls or using any features of Teams application. Many users took to Twitter to share updates about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2023