Microsoft says productivity software suite recovered after outage

(Reuters) -Microsoft said its cloud-based productivity software suite, which includes Word, Excel and Teams, among other widely used tools, has recovered after an outage impacted thousands of users on Thursday.

"We can confirm the issue impacting connectivity to Microsoft services is now mitigated," the Windows parent said in a post on X.

The company had said a change within a third-party internet service provider's (ISP) "managed-environment" resulted in an impact. Microsoft started to see signs of a recovery after the ISP reverted the change.

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

The technology giant's Azure cloud platform had said on X it was probing customer reports of a potential issue connecting Microsoft's services from AT&T networks.

"We experienced a brief disruption connecting to some Microsoft services on our network. The issue has been resolved and connections are operating normally," an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement.

Incident reports for Microsoft 365 fell to about 800, as of 10:28 A.M. ET, after having peaked at more than 23,000 earlier in the day.

Downdetector said it had seen more than 90,000 user reports come in within the United States for Microsoft 365, with Azure, Teams, Xbox, Bing, Microsoft Store and all of the company's 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.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)