A global outage in Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, affected millions of users worldwide. The issue temporarily knocked numerous websites and services offline or slowed them down, including popular services like the Starbucks app, Costco, Office 365, Minecraft, and Xbox Live. The outage was reportedly caused by a problem affecting Microsoft’s Azure Front Door service.
Microsoft admits ‘configuration error’: Behind the scenes of the Azure outage
Microsoft officially confirmed the outage. A company spokesperson stated that they were working to resolve an issue affecting Azure Front Door. A detailed statement later stated that the issue was caused by an “unintended configuration change.” After identifying this, Microsoft announced that they had begun deploying the “last known good configuration” to address the issue, and that customers would begin to see a gradual recovery.
The outage’s impact wasn’t limited to digital applications. The website of London’s Heathrow Airport was down due to the issue. Alaska Airlines confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that it had experienced “outages to key systems, including its websites.” The Scottish Parliament reported that voting was suspended due to technical issues. Vodafone users in the UK also reported issues such as not being able to obtain one-time passwords for security purposes.
During this outage, some users reported problems with Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Amazon denied these claims, stating through a spokesperson that AWS was “operating normally.” This brought to mind the massive AWS outage that took numerous popular sites offline last week.
It’s noteworthy that all these technical issues occurred on the same day Microsoft released its highly positive quarterly earnings report. The company announced revenue of $77.7 billion, exceeding Wall Street expectations, and that its Azure business saw growth of approximately 40 percent.
What are your thoughts on this global access issue, which once again demonstrates the criticality of cloud services? Were any services affected by this outage during the day?
