According to Microsoft, the productivity software suite has been restored after an outage

(Reuters) – Microsoft said its cloud-based productivity software suite, which includes Word, Excel and Teams among other widely used tools, had recovered from an outage that affected thousands of users on Thursday.

“We can confirm that the issue affecting connectivity to Microsoft services is now resolved,” the Windows parent company said in a post on X.

The company had said a change in an Internet service provider's (ISP) “managed environment” had had an impact. Microsoft saw signs of recovery after the ISP reversed the change.

The outage occurred nearly two months after a faulty software update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike affected nearly 8.5 million Windows devices and brought operations to a standstill across numerous industries, from airlines and banks to healthcare.

The technology giant's Azure cloud platform had stated on X that it was reviewing customer reports about a possible problem connecting Microsoft services to AT&T's networks.

“We experienced a brief interruption in connectivity to some Microsoft services on our network. The issue has been resolved and connections are back to normal,” an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement.

Incident reports for Microsoft 365 dropped to about 800 by 10:28 a.m. ET, after peaking at over 23,000 earlier in the day.

Downdetector said it had received more than 90,000 user reports on Microsoft 365 in the US, with increased numbers of cases identified in Azure, Teams, Xbox, Bing, the Microsoft Store and all other parts of the company's business.

The platform, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from a range of sources, including user-reported bugs on its platform, said the outage appeared to have affected other businesses as well.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)