Microsoft says productivity software suite recovering after outage

(Reuters) -Microsoft said its cloud-based software suite was recovering after an outage impacted thousands of its users on Thursday.

“We’ve worked with the third-party internet service provider (ISP) and confirmed that a change within their managed-environment resulted in impact. The ISP has reverted the change and we’re now seeing signs of recovery,” Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s service dashboard said.

The Microsoft 365 productivity software suite includes Word and Excel, among other widely used tools.

The outage comes nearly two months after a faulty software update from cybersecurity services provider CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:CRWD) affected nearly 8.5 million Windows devices, crippling operations across industries ranging from airlines and banks to healthcare.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform had said on X it was probing customer reports of a potential issue connecting Microsoft’s services from AT&T (NYSE:T) networks.

The telecom operator did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage.

Incident reports for Microsoft 365 fell to about 1,700, as of 9:53 A.M. ET, after having peaked at around 23,000.

Downdetector said it had seen more than 90,000 user reports come in within the U.S. for Microsoft 365 since about 7:45 A.M. ET, with Azure, Teams, Xbox, Bing and all Microsoft entities seeing elevated cases.

The platform, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, said the outage appeared to be affecting other companies as well.