Germany is investigating a Microsoft outage affecting users around the world today.
The interior ministry said the country’s cyber security office was investigating to determine the potential culprits behind the attack.
“The scope and origin of these attacks are currently being clarified,” a spokesman said.
The company did not say how many people were affected, but Downdetector.com, which tracks outages, recorded Thousands of people report issues Use Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365, and XBox Live.
It showed that UK email platform Outlook reported 4,992 incidents at 8am today, while Teams reported 2,173.
Users in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Norwich, Oxford, Brighton and Cardiff reported problems.
By late morning, Downdetector showed that the number of reports had dropped significantly.
The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account reported: “We continue to monitor the recovery across the service, and some customers are reporting some easing.”
“We’re also connecting the service to other infrastructure to speed up the recovery process.”
Reports of Teams outages have also been spotted in other countries, including India, Japan, Australia and the United Arab Emirates.
Many users were unable to exchange messages, join calls or use any functionality of the Teams app — forcing office workers to communicate in other ways.
More than 280 million people around the world use Teams, and it forms a vital part of the day-to-day operations of businesses and schools, using the service to make calls, schedule meetings, and organize workflow.
Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were also affected, according to the company’s status page.
Azure, the company’s cloud computing unit, also tweeted about the outage, saying some users were experiencing issues with the platform.
Azure, which has 15 million enterprise customers and more than 500 million active users, revealed on its status page that its services were affected globally.
The outage comes as Microsoft – which has more than 220,000 employees, including 6,000 in the UK – announced last week plans to produce 10,000 layoffs across its global operations.