Microsoft Resolves Outage Affecting Teams, Xbox Live

Microsoft said it has resolved an issue that led to connection problems for Teams and Xbox Live for thousands of users in the UK, Germany and other European countries on Friday.

More than 1,500 UK users reported problems accessing Microsoft’s messaging service Team on Friday morning, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.

A similar number reported issues with Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online platform for accessing games.

Microsoft said on X, formerly Twitter, that the issues were caused by “an artificial increase in synthetic network traffic” and said it had made configuration changes to remediate the impact.

‘Network anomalies’

“After monitoring the service, we’ve confirmed the issue is now resolved,” the company said.

Microsoft had earlier written that it had “identified some anomalies within our network infrastructure”, adding that the issues only affected customers in the UK and Germany.

But Downdetector showed issues reported by some users in other European countries, including Finland, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland.

The issues came on the launch day of a hotly anticipated new game in Microsoft’s popular Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

The Call of Duty series was formerly developed by Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft last month for $69 billion (£56bn), in the gaming industry’s largest-ever deal.

Access issues

The issues meant that some people who had paid £69.99 for Modern Warfare 3 had problems signing in to download and play the game.

Reports on social media indicated issues with signing in and making server connections.

“Is #MicrosoftTeams down, or is it just me?” wrote one user on X.

“Unable to access Teams. Is there an issue?” another user wrote.

In January thousands of users were left unable to access Microsoft services for several hours, including Teams and Outlook, after a software update caused issues.