Microsoft says service issues "fully resolved" after outage temporarily shuts down systems

Microsoft services were unavailable for many customers early Thursday, with users reporting problems accessing a number of the technology giant's tools, according to Downdetector.

The reports relate to issues across multiple Microsoft products including Xbox; Microsoft 365, which encompasses a suite of business tools; Microsoft Teams; Outlook and Azure, its cloud-computing service. 

Reports of issues started to spike just before 8 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday. By 9 a.m., more than 24,000 outages had been reported by users of Microsoft 365 alone, according to Downdetector, which only reports incidents for which there is a high volume of complaints compared with a typical day.