At Westminster, members of Parliament reported that access to Microsoft products through parliamentary accounts was down.
By early Friday afternoon GMT, the company was reporting improvements. Email queues were"significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,"Microsoft said.
"We are working with Microsoft to resolve the matter as quickly as possible,"the spokesperson said. Alternative arrangements were in place.
In Australia, spy and federal police agencies were affected, though officials suggested the impact was minimal.
Via Rail, Canada's national train network, said in a post on X that passengers might not be able to receive emails about their trips because of the outage.
OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft's services. The problem caused some tools not to work as expected.
Plattner said the disruption was"affecting the whole world."In some countries, including Russia, Microsoft applications are heavily restricted or being phased out in favor of domestic alternatives.