US tech giant Microsoft said on Wednesday it had suffered a global outage that limited access to software including Outlook and Teams for several hours.

Tens of thousands of incidents were logged by the tracking website Downdetector, with complaints spiking in the hour from 0700 GMT and particularly affecting users in Asia and Europe.

The firm said it had discovered a "networking configuration issue" that it was working on before tweeting at 1430 GMT that "the impacted services have recovered and remain stable".

Microsoft did not reveal how many users were affected and did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

But it said access had been disrupted for users of several apps on the Microsoft 365 online office platform, which has more than 300 million users worldwide.

Teams, a messaging programme for companies, and email client Outlook are among the most widely used.

Thousands took to social media to voice their dismay at the technical problems.

"I have a paper in half an hour on MS teams and the servers are not working in India. Please do something," said one Twitter user shortly after the services went down.

Earlier this month, the firm announced it would be cutting 10,000 staff, almost five percent of its global workforce.