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Microsoft is investigating an outage where thousands of customers were reportedly unable to connect to certain Microsoft services from AT&T networks early Thursday morning. Some Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, were impacted, as well as Microsoft's cloud platform Azure.
"We are investigating customer reports of a potential issue connecting to Microsoft services from AT&T networks. More details will be provided as they become available," Microsoft Azure's support account wrote around 9:00 a.m. ET. Microsoft's Azure status page reflected the same message at time of writing.
An hour later, Microsoft's 365 X account said that "a change within a third-party ISP's managed environment resulted in impact. The ISP has reverted the change and we're now seeing signs of recovery."
Users reported issues with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Store, and Xbox live, each impacting thousands of customers unable to connect, according to data from Downdetector. Microsoft 365 received over 23,000 outage reports, while nearly 5,000 users reported issues getting onto Microsoft Teams.
“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 tells PCMag via email. AT&T does not currently believe the issue was caused by any foul play.
Over 4,000 users reported issues with AT&T early Thursday. Both AT&T and these Microsoft services all began receiving a spike of outage reports around 8:00 a.m. Thursday morning.
Some Microsoft users with AT&T reported connection issues in Florida, Ohio, Texas, Alabama, Connecticut, and Mississippi. On Reddit, users suggested the outage may be due to an issue with AT&T's fiber internet, as they found Microsoft services were working on Starlink, T-Mobile, and Verizon, but not AT&T fiber.
57% of AT&T outage reports on Downdetector claimed problems with their hardline internet services (like fiber), while only 23% said the issues occurred on their mobile phones.
Since the outages began, some users have already reported that their services were restored in certain areas, like Miami and Forth Worth, after a few hours. In a statement, Microsoft tells PCMag that by 11:00 a.m., it found that the incident had been fully resolved.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to include comment from Microsoft. Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.