Microsoft is investigating an outage that left thousands of users around the world unable to access the website's services, including Teams and Outlook.

The company did not say how many were affected, but Downdetector.com, which tracks outages, recorded thousands of people reporting problems with Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and XBox Live.

It showed 4,992 incidents had been reported with email platform Outlook in the UK by 8am today - and 2,173 with Teams.

Users in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Norwich, Oxford, Brighton and Cardiff reported problems.

The site also reported more than 3,900 issues with Microsoft Teams in India and more than 900 in Japan.

Outage reports also rose in other countries, including Australia and the United Arab Emirates.

During the outage, most users were unable to exchange messages, join calls or use any features of the Teams application - forcing office workers to return to in-person meetings and communicate in other ways.

Microsoft tweeted: "We're investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services. More info can be found in the admin centre under MO502273.

"We've identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps."

It later added: "We've isolated the problem to networking configuration issues, and we're analysing the best mitigation strategy to address these without causing additional impact.

"We've rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact. We're monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect."

Microsoft's cloud unit Azure also tweeted about the outage, and said that a subset of users was experiencing problems with the platform.

Many Microsoft users posted on social media to share updates on the disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on Twitter.

"Microsoft Teams and outlook are having issues here in Ethiopia… are these services down?" one tweeted.

Another wrote: "Microsoft Outlook, Teams services down in Sri Lanka and around the globe."

Microsoft Teams is used by more than 280 million people worldwide and forms an essential part of daily operations for businesses and schools, which use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organise their workflow.

Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were also affected, according to the company's status page.

The outage comes after Microsoft - which employs more than 220,000 people, including 6,000 in the UK - announced plans last week to make 10,000 job cuts across its global operations.

In a note to employees, chief executive Satya Nadella said the layoffs, affecting less than 5% of the workforce, were the result of a fall in investment as fears grow that the US and other key growth markets are heading for recession.