Microsoft’s Outlook and Teams apps have stopped working properly amid what appears to be a major outage.

Both apps are part of the Office 365 suite, Microsoft’s offering for businesses.

The outage came towards the beginning of the working day in Europe, and left many without the ability to communicate with their colleagues.

Microsoft Teams is the company’s workplace chat app, and competes with other messaging platforms such as Slack. Outlook and its associated online services are used for workplace emails and calendar functions such as scheduling meetings.

Both appeared not to be working properly on Monday morning, according to users and tracking website Down Detector.

Microsoft said it was aware of some issues with Exchange Online – the email hosting service for businesses that is accessed through Outlook – as well as in the calendar functionality in Teams.

“We’re investigating an issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within Microsoft Teams calendar,” it said, and directed affected users to its online admin centre. That page is intended for network administrators and other professionals who manage IT networks, and requires a login.

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