Microsoft Azure’s services restored after global outage
(Reuters) –Microsoft It said late Wednesday that it had resolved the outage to the tech giant’s Azure cloud platform, which affected its suite of productivity software and several industries around the world.
Microsoft Azure stated that the incident lasted more than 8 hours and said, “While error rates and delays have returned to pre-incident levels, a small number of customers may still be experiencing issues and we are still working to reduce this long tail.” he said.
Alaska Airlines said earlier in the day that it had experienced an outage of key systems, including its website, due to the Azure outage, and that it would bring the systems back online once Microsoft resolved the issue.
London Heathrow Airport’s website is back online after problems experienced earlier in the day. Vodafone was also affected by the outage.
Affected services include Azure Communications Services and Media Services.
Microsoft’s outage follows last week’s outage at Amazon AWS, which caused global turmoil across thousands of websites and some of the most popular apps such as Snapchat and Reddit.
Microsoft 365 had said its services were experiencing a downside impact related to the Azure outage, before confirming later in the day that the impact of the Azure configuration change had been resolved.
Starting at 12 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Azure said its customers and Microsoft services that leverage Azure Front Door, a global cloud-based content and application delivery network, were experiencing issues resulting in timeouts and errors.
According to Downdetector, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from a variety of sources, the number of users reporting issues with Azure dropped to 230 as of 6:49 PM ET, from a peak of over 18,000 earlier in the day.
Downdetector’s website showed the Microsoft 365 outage had narrowed to 77 users reporting issues as of 10:44 PM ET, down from a peak of nearly 20,000. The numbers are based on user-submitted reports and the actual number of affected users may vary.
The AWS outage was the largest internet outage since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction disrupted technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, exposing the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Disha Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber, Alan Barona and Rashmi Aich)
