"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)," the company said in a statement.
The failure also hit Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune and other services.
The company did not unveil 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," Miscrosft added later in the day.
The outage came less than a day after the company released its latest quarterly financial results report. The analysis showed that Microsoft had faced the slowest sales growth in December 2022 over the past six years. Moreover, the company suffered losses of $1.2 billion amid massive layoffs.