AT&T Customers Experience Microsoft 365 Outages

Thousands of users reported Microsoft outages on Thursday, a software issue that affected businesses and companies across the eastern part of the United States.

Customers reported to website tracker DownDetector that they were unable to access services hosted by Microsoft. The issues related to a number of Microsoft-powered services, from the 365 business suite, to Azure and Bing.

"Downdetector users are reporting possible issues with Microsoft Services when connecting through AT&T Fiber in the U.S. East region," read a banner on the website.

Users began reporting Microsoft outages as early as 8 a.m. ET. The total number of reports reached 24,000 by 9 a.m., according to DownDetector. The number of affected users rose to more than 90,000, with Azure, Teams, Xbox, Bing, Microsoft Store and all of the company's entities seeing elevated cases. The numbers have slowly decreased in the last hour as Microsoft dealt with the issue causing the outages.

Microsoft, AT&T Respond to Outages

"We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services," Microsoft posted to X around 8:30 AM EST. The company said it is reviewing "network telemetry" and recent changes to its infrastructure. It eventually confirmed that the outage was due to a change within a "third-party ISP's managed-environment" and that the change had been reverted as of 10:45 a.m.

"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 told Reuters.

The outage occurred months after an update from backup provider CrowdStrike caused outages on Windows devices around the world.