Microsoft’s cloud services restored after 8-hour global outage
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Microsoft said it was seeing strong signs of improvement across affected regions.
PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON – Microsoft has resolved an outage of its Azure cloud platform on Oct 29 that impacted its suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
“While error rates and latency are back to pre-incident levels, a small number of customers may still be seeing issues, and we are still working to mitigate this long tail,” Microsoft Azure said, adding that the incident lasted for over eight hours.
Alaska Airlines earlier in the day said it experienced a disruption to its key systems, including its website, due to the Azure outage and was bringing systems back online once Microsoft resolved the issue.
The website of London’s Heathrow Airport was back online after issues affected it earlier in the day. Vodafone was also impacted due to the outage.
Affected services include Azure Communication Services and Media Services, among others.
Configuration changes are routine in technology operations – companies make them constantly to improve services, add features, or fix problems.
However, even a small error in configuration can cascade through highly interconnected systems and spread almost instantly to cloud customers worldwide.
The Microsoft outage follows last week’s disruption at Amazon AWS
Microsoft 365 said its services experienced a downstream impact related to the Azure outage, before confirming late in the day that the impact from the Azure configuration change had been resolved.
Beginning at about 12pm ET on Oct 29, Azure said its customers and Microsoft services that leverage Azure Front Door, a global cloud-based content and application delivery network, had experienced issues resulting in timeouts and errors.
The number of users reporting issues with Azure had dropped to 230, as at 6.49pm ET, from a peak of over 18,000 earlier in the day, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.
The outage at Microsoft 365 had eased to 77 users reporting issues, as at 10.44pm ET, down from a peak of nearly 20,000, Downdetector’s website showed.
The AWS outage was the largest internet disruption since the 2024 CrowdStrike malfunction
