Microsoft, the world's largest technology company, experienced a major outage on Wednesday, with thousands of users reporting failures in accessing the company's online services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Xbox Live.
 
In a statement, the company said that "starting at 07:05 UTC [07:05 GMT] on 25 January 2023, customers may experience issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources [Microsoft's cloud computing platform] in Public Azure regions, as well as other Microsoft services including M365, PowerBI. We've determined the network connectivity issue is occurring with devices across the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN)."
 
Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, and other services were also affected.

2022 hasn't been kind to major #US tech companies, as inflation, soaring prices, and the pandemic has hit different industries. pic.twitter.com/3s3yuiEGZL

— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) January 10, 2023

The company did not disclose the number of users affected by the outage, but according to the Downdetector tracking website, about 2,000 incidents have been reported so far, with users in India affected the most. 
 
"We have identified a recent change to WAN as the underlying cause, and have taken steps to roll back this change ... We are continuing to actively monitor the situation. With WAN networking now seeing recovery, we are working to ensure full recovery for impacted services," Microsoft added later in the day. 
 
The outage occurred less than a day after the company's latest quarterly financial results report was released. Microsoft had the slowest sales growth in December 2022 over the previous six years.

Furthermore, Microsoft plans to fire around 5% of its employees worldwide in January, which is approximately 10,000-11,000 jobs, UK broadcaster Sky News reported.
 
The IT behemoth may announce staff reduction plans in the coming days, according to the broadcaster, adding that the decision was motivated primarily by the current economic climate.