Microsoft cloud outage crippled businesses in the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.

On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. experienced a network outage that rendered its Azure cloud platform, as well as applications like Teams and Outlook, unavailable, potentially impacting millions of customers globally.

Services in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa were impacted, according to Azure’s status page. The only unaffected services were those in China and its platform for governments.

Almost all of the biggest corporations in the world utilize Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, so an outage there may affect a variety of services and have a cascading impact.

Microsoft stated, “We discovered that the network connectivity issue affects devices on the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN).” According to the report, this has an impact on both client-to-Azure internet access as well as data center service connectivity.

Microsoft also explained in a tweet that it had undone a network change that it thought was the root of the issue. While the rollback is in force, “We are monitoring the service,” it said.

Microsoft did not provide information on how many customers were impacted, but statistics from the website Downdetector, which tracks outages, revealed that there were thousands of events across multiple countries.

By aggregating status reports from sources, including user-submitted issues on its platform, the Downdetector website tracks outages.

Big tech platform outages are widespread; various businesses, like Google and Meta, have encountered service interruptions. After Amazon, Azure is the second-largest cloud service provider, but it has had disruptions recently.

However, an outage is having a greater impact because of the growing reliance on online platforms as more workers over the past three years have started working from home.

Users had trouble sending and receiving messages, taking calls, or other Teams program capabilities during the outage. The hashtag #MicrosoftTeams was trending on Twitter as a result of the large number of individuals who used the social media platform to share updates about the service outage.

The daily operations of businesses and educational institutions rely heavily on Microsoft Teams, which is utilized by more than 280 million people globally. Users use the service to make calls, arrange meetings, and manage their workflow.

According to the company’s status page, Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business were among the other services impacted.