Microsoft says Teams and Xbox fixed in UK and Europe

Microsoft has said problems with accessing its Teams messaging app and XBox gaming platform across the UK and Europe have now been resolved.

More than 1,500 people in the UK reported issues with Teams, according to outage tracker Downdetector.

A similar number also said there were problems with Xbox Live.

It left some who have bought the latest game in the Call of Duty series, released on Friday, unable to pay it but Microsoft said this is now fixed.

On X, formerly Twitter, Microsoft said the services were impacted by "an artificial increase in synthetic network traffic".

"We've made configuration changes to remediate impact and after monitoring the service, we've confirmed the issue is now resolved," it said.

The company previously said it had "identified some anomalies within our network infrastructure".

The problem was unique to customers in the UK and Germany, Microsoft had said earlier on Friday, but on social media, people in Sweden and Poland said they had been unable to access services.

There were reports from both of these countries on DownDetector, as well as other European countries including Finland and Switzerland.

Microsoft last faced outages in January when tens of thousands of customers reported problems.

Call of Duty launch

The problem emerged at a bad time for Microsoft, which on launched the latest game in its Call of Duty series on Friday.

Gamers play the new Call of Duty game in London

It means some people who paid £69.99 for a digital copy of Modern Warfare 3 struggled to sign in to download the game.

Microsoft paid $69bn (£56bn) in October to purchase Call of Duty maker-Activision Blizzard in the gaming industry's biggest ever deal.

Reports on DownDetector highlighted issues with login details and server connections as potential problems affecting the platform.

"Can't access any games. Being told 'the person who bought this needs to sign in' and nothing is working," one UK user complained to Xbox's support account on X, shortly before 10am on Friday.

Google Trends data indicated that other users had been receiving this message on their accounts.

The BBC has approached Microsoft for comment.