Oct 9 (Reuters) -

An outage affecting thousands of users of Microsoft's ( MSFT )

suite of productivity software on Thursday has eased,

according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The number of users reporting issues with Microsoft ( MSFT ) 365 had

fallen to over 1,500 as of 3.07 p.m. ET, compared with 17,000

earlier, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by

collating status reports from a number of sources.

Downdetector's numbers are based on user-submitted reports.

The actual number of affected users may vary.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) 365 said it had rerouted the impacted traffic to

healthy infrastructure and is seeing improvements to service

health, on its status page on X.

Initial reports showed issues accessing Microsoft Teams

and Exchange Online.