Massive Downtime on Azure Affecting 365, Xbox, Minecraft & Others

One week after internet outages caused by AWS, Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, is currently experiencing an outage. Microsoft services that are hosted on Azure, such as Xbox, Minecraft, and Microsoft 365, have been affected by the problems. Microsoft noted the issue on the service’s status page, and the issues began at roughly 12:00 ET. The outages at other businesses, including Starbucks, Capital One, and Alaska Airlines, were apparently connected to Azure’s issues.

The outage has been attributed by Microsoft to a DNS issue and a “inadvertent configuration change” on Azure’s status page. Customers should soon begin to witness symptoms of recovery, with “full mitigation” anticipated in the next four hours, the business announced at approximately 3:20 PM ET, having completed the deployment of its “last known good” configuration.

Microsoft’s primary website was still loading slowly as the company’s earnings were announced at 4 PM ET, and the problem has not yet been fixed.

Microsoft 365’s status page on X said at 12:25 PM ET that the firm is looking into allegations of “problems accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin centre.” In an update released at 1:02 PM ET, Microsoft 365 stated that it has “identified portions of internal infrastructure that are experiencing connectivity issues” and is attempting to “reroute affected traffic to restore service health.” Xbox’s status page is still not loading in the interim.

As a result of Azure problems, Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines report that they are “currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites.” This outage extends beyond Microsoft’s services. Customers who are unable to check in online for their flight are advised by the airlines to see an agent at the airport to obtain their boarding card.

The UK internet company Community Fibre also acknowledged that the Microsoft outage might be causing problems for some of its users. Customers were also reporting problems with Capital One, Starbucks’ and Costco’s websites were not loading, and Kroger informed them that its mobile apps and website were “experiencing an unexpected outage.”

Microsoft says, “they believe that this problem was caused by an unintentional configuration change.” The date for the service restoration according to the company is yet to be be disclosed.

Around 12 PM ET, complaints of Azure problems started to spike on DownDetector. This also coincides with claims of an outage affecting Xbox and Microsoft 365. Some Reddit users in the US and UK said that they couldn’t access Azure’s interface.

This outage has caused several Microsoft services, such as Minecraft, Xbox, and Microsoft 365, to fall offline. Also unavailable are the websites of other companies, like Costco and Starbucks.

Microsoft is expected to release its financial reports this afternoon, and this disruption occurs just hours before that. The incident had an impact on a number of websites, banks, and government institutions.