Microsoft 365, including Outlook, down for thousands of users

Microsoft 365 and its cloud service Azure went down on Thursday, September 12, leaving thousands of users around the world without services.

Shortly after 8:30 a.m. ET, the company announced in a post on X that it was “investigating an issue where users may be unable to access several Microsoft 365 services.”

The outage affected the use of various Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams and XBox Live, according to The Evening Standard.

According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, nearly 25,000 users were temporarily without service during the outage.

According to information on the website, the first reports of outages came in around 7:45 a.m. and peaked just before 9:00 a.m.

Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service, announced on X that it too is “investigating customer reports of a potential issue” that reportedly affects those “connecting to Microsoft services from AT&T networks.”

On September 12, over 1,600 outages were reported shortly after 9:00 a.m. Nearly 1,000 Azure outages were also reported on Wednesday morning, September 11.

“More details will be announced as they become available,” Azure said in its statement on X.

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It is unclear when the technical issues with Azure and Microsoft 365 will be fully resolved.

Microsoft and AT&T did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

This outage occurred less than two months after a massive IT outage affected users of Microsoft 365 apps on July 19. The outage was blamed on a failed software update from American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.

The outage, which affected major airlines, hospital systems and companies around the world, was a lengthy process to resolve.

Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity consultant, described the extraordinary event on X as “the largest IT outage in history.”

“This is basically what we were all worried about about the Y2K problem, only this time it actually happened,” he explained in the post, sharing the day the blackout began.