Microsoft investigating new service outage

Microsoft has said it is investigating reports of users having problems accessing its services, with some reporting being unable to access email and other functions.

An alert on the technology giant’s service status website said it is looking into a “network infrastructure” issue.

According to website status platform DownDetector, users of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Xbox Live and players of popular video game Minecraft were among those reporting issues.

The incident comes less than two weeks after a major IT outage knocked global infrastructure including transport and healthcare services offline because a flawed software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected Microsoft devices.

On its service status website, Microsoft said: “We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally.

“Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services. We have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue. More details will be provided as soon as possible.”

Azure is the technology giant’s cloud computing platform, with its servers used to host a wide range of platforms and applications.

The US firm’s alert said the problem appeared to be linked to “issues accessing a subset of Microsoft services”.

In a post to the Microsoft 365 status account on X, formerly Twitter , the company added that users had reported “access issues” and “degraded performance” with “multiple Microsoft 365 services and features”.

The issue does not currently appear to be as serious as the CrowdStrike outage, which knocked entire businesses and digital infrastructure offline, cancelling flights and causing major disruption to health services in the UK.

Instead, this latest issue appears to be affecting access to websites and services.

In a statement posted to its website banking giant NatWest said: “We’re aware of an issue preventing some customers from accessing some of our webpages. We’re working on a fix and apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

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