Microsoft Corp. faced a major global outage on Wednesday that disrupted access to its Azure cloud platform and key services under the Microsoft 365 suite, temporarily affecting thousands of users worldwide.
Issuing an update over the matter, the tech giant said a “recent configuration change” to a portion of its Azure infrastructure had triggered the outage.
“We’re pursuing multiple remediation strategies, including moving traffic away from the impacted infrastructure and blocking the offending change,” Microsoft 365 said in an update on its service status page, reported Reuters.
Microsoft confirmed that users were unable to access several of its business applications and gaming services, including Office 365, Minecraft, X-Box Live and Copilot. “We’re investigating reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center,” the company said in a post on X.
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The company added that parts of its internal infrastructure were experiencing connectivity issues and that recovery efforts were underway. Azure’s own status page also confirmed it had “taken action to address the issue of customers being unable to access the Azure Portal” while continuing to investigate the root cause.
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Outage reports surge across major platforms
According to Downdetector, a website that monitors online outages, issue reports spiked shortly after 11 am in New York.
At its peak, more than 18,000 users reported trouble accessing Azure, while nearly 11,700 users flagged issues with Microsoft 365.
By 1:07 pm ET, those numbers had dropped to 4,584 and 4,332 respectively, indicating that the situation was gradually improving, according to Reuters. Downdetector’s data is based on user submissions and may not reflect the total number of affected users.
Airline, businesses hit by outage
The Azure outage also affected third-party systems dependent on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. Alaska Airlines said its website and mobile app went down on Wednesday, citing a “global outage affecting Microsoft’s Azure platform.”
The airline, which had faced a separate technology glitch last week that grounded flights across the U.S., said the latest disruption impacted several key systems. “We’re looking into the issue,” the carrier said on X as it responded to passengers facing difficulties accessing its services.
The outage came just hours before Microsoft was set to announce its quarterly earnings, and barely a week after Amazon Web Services suffered one of the worst outages in its history – a 15-hour disruption that affected hundreds of companies and consumer apps worldwide.
While Amazon remains the dominant player in cloud computing, Microsoft Azure ranks second globally, ahead of Google Cloud in most markets.
As of late Wednesday, Microsoft said mitigation efforts were continuing and most services had started to recover.
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