Microsoft has said it has fully restored cloud services after a networking outage took its Azure cloud platform offline on Wednesday, downing workplace services such as Teams and Outlook used by hundreds of millions worldwide.

Users in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa were affected by the outage, with only China and its platform for governments avoiding disruption.

By late morning, Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft wide area network (WAN). Azure has 15m corporate customers and over 500m active users, according to Microsoft.

An outage of Azure affects multiple high-traffic services used by many of the world's largest companies, causing significant disruption, especially since the pandemic, which caused businesses to become increasingly dependent on online platforms.

Microsoft earlier said it had determined a network connectivity issue was occurring with devices across the Microsoft WAN, affecting connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure as well as connectivity between services and data centres.

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Microsoft took to social media to tweet it had rolled back a network change that it believed was causing the issue and was using "additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process".

The company did not disclose the number of users affected, but data from Downdetector showed thousands of incidents on several continents.

Microsoft on Tuesday forecast third-quarter earnings for its intelligent cloud business of $21.7-22bn despite concerns of major customers big tech cutting back following several redundancy announcements.

Microsoft was among the firms to announce layoffs, with 10,000 job cuts signalled last week. Azure held a 30% of the cloud computing market last year, trailing on Amazon Web Services, according to BofA Global Research.

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