Microsoft is struggling with massive technical difficulties in the promising and fast-growing cloud business.
On Wednesday, several thousand users around the world reported problems accessing emails via Outlook or with Teams video conferences on websites such as Downdetector.com.
Microsoft initially did not provide any information about the number of people affected.
As a possible reason for the outages, the company named a network problem that affects access to the servers of the cloud division Azure.
In countries like Germany or India, numerous users reported difficulties.
On the short message service Twitter, users said that they could not hold video conferences via teams.
Other users reported not having access to new emails.
Customers were also turned away in shops with reference to "Microsoft problems" with the checkout system.
Microsoft announced on Twitter that it is currently investigating the cause of the problems.
There are sporadic interruptions in the services that the company provides via the cloud data cloud.
The next steps are currently being examined in order to resolve the difficulties.
How long that would take was initially unclear.
Microsoft's Teams chat and video conferencing software is used by approximately 280 million people around the world.
Many companies and educational institutions use it to organize everyday life.
According to Microsoft, the current disruption also affects other services such as the Exchange e-mail server or the online storage SharePoint and OneDrive.
The cloud division was one of the few bright spots in Microsoft's balance sheet for the past quarter.
It grew by 31 percent, while sales increased by 2 percent, which is the lowest rate in years.
However, the company's guidance for cloud revenue for the current quarter of $21.7 billion to $22 billion fell short of the median market expectation of $22.14 billion.