Microsoft Azure is experiencing difficulties — the second critical cloud platform to do so in under a fortnight.
The US company has confirmed that a DNS issue is causing difficulty with its cloud platform, which powers some of the biggest brands on the internet, including Xbox Live, Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft 365, Minecraft, and Costco, to name just a few.
Trying to access any of these websites, mobile apps, or online services right now will likely leave you confronted with an error message or a never-ending loading animation. In other words, if you're wondering why Microsoft Word or Microsoft Teams isn't working for you at the moment, it's probably not your broadband connection.
Microsoft 365 is a monthly subscription that includes apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and Outlook.
It's not only popular apps, but major financial institutions like Natwest, M&S Bank, and Royal Bank of Scotland were also impacted by the issues with Azure — leaving users unable to load them correctly or log in.
According to Down Detector, an independent service that tracks the performance of apps and websites by monitoring social media for reports of possible errors, shows record spikes across the USA and the UK. Some 19,834 users have flooded social media every minute to complain about issues with Microsoft Azure, according to the latest crowdsourced statistics on Down Detector.
Down Detector tracks mentions across social media and other public platforms to check for potential outages. It shows a dramatic spike in reports about MIcrosoft Azure
|DOWN DETECTOR
Other popular brands are reporting similar spikes, like Starbucks, Alaska Airlines, and Zoom. Of course, Down Detector's numbers are based on user-submitted reports, so the actual number of affected users may vary.
What has happened, and why have so many (very different) websites and apps stopped working?
It's all to do with their reliance on one of the most popular cloud computing services, Microsoft Azure, which holds approximately 22% to 24% of the global cloud market, making it the second-largest provider behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has been nicknamed the "backbone" of the internet.
Microsoft Azure has confirmed that a 'configuration change' has caused issues with websites and mobile apps that rely on its cloud platform
|MICROSOFT
Microsoft has confirmed difficulties with its Azure service on its dashboard: "Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue.
"We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state."
The AWS outage was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.