Microsoft says it is still looking into the cause of an outage that affected New Zealand customers on Thursday.

Products such as Outlook, Azure cloud computing and Teams were affected.

There were thousands of reports of Microsoft failures across the country, according to DownDetector, a site which monitors internet outages.

Parliamentary Services said the Parliament precinct was experiencing problems, suggesting a downed server might be to blame. Police shortly after 10am said they had not recieved any emails since 8.20am. Email service resumed about 10.15am.

Internet provider 2Degrees said its customers were affected for a short time, but its engineers had applied a fix to work around the issue.

Both Spark and One NZ, formerly Vodafone, said their services were not affected.

The reports began shortly before 8.30am on Thursday. Around 9.45am, many users online began reporting the services were functioning again.

"Our service availability is continuing to recover for the majority of users," Microsoft said late on Thursday morning.

"However, we've identified a small subset of users experiencing residual impact, and we're applying targeted solutions to provide relief. In parallel, our investigation into what initially caused this issue are ongoing."

Earlier it said it was "investigating reports of access issues with Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, for users in New Zealand".

Later, the company said it did had "rerouted network traffic to alternate infrastructure and are seeing improvements in service ability. We'll continue to closely monitor telemetry as we work to identify the underlying cause of the network issue."

It came a day after Microsoft services including Outlook and Minecraft were subject to a cyber-attack, and nearly two weeks after a botched software rollout by a third party took down millions of computers running Microsoft Windows.

-RNZ