Microsoft Azure outage hits sites, Scottish parliament
Microsoft has implemented a fix to address an outage in the Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services and disrupted the Scottish parliament.
The technology company wrote on its Azure status page that the outage was caused by a configuration change in the Azure infrastructure and that the fix has been rolled out.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company acknowledged issues with the service on Azure Front Door, a global content and application delivery network, its status page and social media accounts.
Since many sites and services use Microsoft’s cloud service, an outage like this could have widespread impacts.
On Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Office 365, Minecraft, XBox Live, Copilot, Costco, Starbucks and many other services throughout the day.
Following the outage, voting in the Scottish parliament was suspended.
Holyrood’s Presiding Officer said technical problems meant MSPs were unable to vote.
Alaska Airlines wrote on account X that the outage was at the root of problems affecting its systems, including check-in services.
Microsoft’s Azure problems come just hours before the company released its quarterly earnings report and a little more than a week after a major outage to Amazon’s cloud computing service disabled a wide range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
Amazon is the dominant provider of cloud computing services, but Microsoft comes in second to Google in most markets.
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