What caused Wednesday morning's Microsoft outage?

Microsoft reported a "networking configuration issue" on Wednesday morning which resulted in an outage of a number of the company's products including Microsoft Teams and Outlook. The biggest hit was Microsoft's Cloud service Azure, which made up 30 percent of the cloud computing market in 2022, reports Reuters.

The main cause of the outage was a network connectivity issue, disrupting the connection between Azure and those on the internet. Many businesses use the software for their own products and services, writes BBC News. Companies and people also had issues joining calls or accessing and sending messages as well without Outlook and Teams.

Microsoft pushed back a network change that the company determined was causing the issue and used "additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process." These types of routine upgrades and maintenance leave systems susceptible to outages, even if only a small error occurs. In turn, it can lead to ripple effects like how Azure's outage led to the failure of a number of systems.

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Service was impacted in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa, however, China was unaffected, per CNN. The outage has revealed how much technology has become central to life, both personally and in business. According to Uptime Institute's 2022 Outage Analysis, "Over 60 [percent] of failures result in at least $100,000 in total losses."

The outage comes just after Microsoft reported its slowest growth in six years in the latest quarter, The New York Times reports. The company also announced a layoff of 10,000 people just last week.

At this time, Microsoft's system has been repaired and service has returned to normal.