SINGAPORE - Microsoft said on Wednesday afternoon that it is probing a networking problem that has caused an outage of its services, including Teams and Outlook.

The tech giant said at around 4pm that users may not be able to access several Microsoft 365 services and that it is troubleshooting a potential networking issue.

Microsoft added that it had received reports that the outage had affected Microsoft 365 apps, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Graph. Many of these apps are an integral part of daily operations of schools and businesses.

Microsoft did not disclose the number of users that were affected by the disruption but data from outage tracking site Downdetector showed thousands of incidents reported globally, with a surge in reports after 2pm.

Mr Wong Zhen Yang, 37, said he had to find ways to work around the outage as it occurred during a presentation.

Mr Wong, who works in a toy manufacturing firm, said: “The Teams app suddenly couldn’t display a few functions, so I couldn’t share my screen with my teammates to show them some numbers.

“(The outage) caused some delays because it was quite hard to describe the presentation to my colleagues. So I sent the charts to them in an e-mail instead to refer to.”

Twitter was rife with memes and complaints from users who were unable to complete work tasks based on Microsoft apps.