After AWS, there is now a disruption at Microsoft: massive cloud outage worldwide

Anyone who has been dependent on one of Microsoft’s Azure online services since around 6 p.m. has probably been in trouble since then. After Amazon Web Services was down for hours last week, it is now the turn of the Microsoft cloud.

Come to the cloud, it’s nicer there…

Like Microsoft has been about in the recent past Azure status portal announced that the US software company’s cloud services have been suffering from widespread outages since around 6:00 p.m. Central European winter time. The problem means that many of Microsoft’s services are currently unusable or only usable to a very limited extent, including Microsoft 365, the Xbox online services and the game Minecraft.

Since then, there have been problems with services that use the “Azure Front Door” function, the company said. These services could therefore currently struggle with increased runtimes, timeouts and errors. It was determined that an unintentionally changed configuration originally triggered the problem and is now working on a fix, it said.

Admin center also down

One of the problems here is that, according to Microsoft, access to the management portals for its online services may not be accessible to customers. This applies, among other things, to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and the Xbox status page, which was temporarily unavailable. Apparently the error also led to a failure in the connections between parts of the internal infrastructure in Microsoft’s cloud service. Because parts of the servers are not accessible, Microsoft says it is trying to get the traffic to its destination in other ways in order to restore the availability of the cloud services. Meanwhile, as in the case of the hour-long outage at Amazon Web Services last week, the problems with the Azure Cloud not only affect the company itself, but also its customers.

The airlines Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines have already reported that they currently have no access to certain systems due to problems with Azure, with the websites of both companies also being affected. As a result, check-in with the airlines is currently not possible online, meaning passengers have to contact airport staff, it is said. There are also problems at some other large US companies, including the sanitary equipment manufacturer Kroger, the wholesaler Costco and the coffee house chain Starbucks, US media report. In Europe and other countries, access to Azure and the services operated on it by Microsoft and other providers currently appears to be either not possible or only possible to a very limited extent.