Massive Azure Outage Knocks Out Microsoft 365 And Xbox - What We Know So Far

Azure is down everywhere.

Microsoft

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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• Microsoft Azure went down globally today.
• Microsoft customer-facing services specified arsenic Microsoft 365 and Outlook were affected.
• We don't cognize why it happened aliases erstwhile it will beryllium fixed.

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, and galore of america were miserable. This week, it's Microsoft Azure's move to autumn down and spell boom, and erstwhile more, we're beautiful darn unhappy astir it. 

Microsoft says this latest Azure outage began astatine astir noon ET connected October 29. However, Downdetector, which relies connected personification reports, shows nan problems surfaced earlier, astir 11:40 a.m. 

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Unlike nan AWS failure, which -- while monolithic successful its harm -- was constricted to a azygous region (AWS East), according to nan Azure Status page arsenic of 1:30 p.m. ET, each Azure regions are down. 

It whitethorn not beryllium arsenic bad arsenic nan unreality work monitoring institution StatusGator claims, "Azure is down, and truthful is half nan internet," but it's much than bad enough. Reports of Azure failures are flooding successful from astir nan world.

We still don't cognize what caused this. Microsoft states: "Starting astatine astir 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting successful a nonaccomplishment of readiness of immoderate services. We fishy that an inadvertent configuration alteration was nan trigger arena for this issue. We are taking 2 concurrent actions wherever we are blocking each changes to nan AFD services and astatine nan aforesaid clip rolling backmost to our past known bully state."

Making matters worse, Azure users are reporting that "Our full model went down on @Azure, but thing is showing connected nan position page. Azure portal is surgery and cannot position immoderate services." In different words, galore group can't moreover get a grip connected precisely which of their services are down. 

Which sites and services are affected?

Ordinary group are emotion nan symptom arsenic well. Popular services specified arsenic Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Intune for business users and Xbox Live and Minecraft for group conscionable wanting to person nosy are besides down. Others are reporting that Microsoft logins are besides slowing to a crawl aliases failing entirely.  

The pursuing services person been affected:

• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Copilot
• Microsoft Entra
• Microsoft Store
• Microsoft Teams
• Minecraft
• Xbox 

It's a bad time if you trust connected Microsoft.

But, as Ookla telecom expert Luke Kehoe said, "Microsoft Azure has knocked galore services offline worldwide, pinch a wide blast radius crossed airlines, banks, and authorities agencies. It is nan 2nd specified arena this month, highlighting nan systemic risks of attraction and azygous points of logical failure, sloppy of really physically hardened nan infrastructure is." 

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He's sewage a point. We trust excessively overmuch connected AWS, Azure, and different unreality services that, erstwhile push comes to shove, move retired to beryllium azygous points of failure. 

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