Internet users were left in the dark Wednesday as problems with Microsoft services caused widespread outages at popular sites like Xbox, Kroger and Starbucks.
According to DownDetector, tens of thousands of users have reported experiencing outages on Microsoft Azure, the tech giant’s cloud platform.
Users of Minecraft, Xbox and Microsoft 365 – all owned by the tech giant – reported problems accessing websites. Other popular retailers such as Kroger and Starbucks were also affected by the outage.
“We apologize for the inconvenience,” Kruger wrote on X. “All banner sites and mobile apps are experiencing an unexpected outage at this time. Our technical teams are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible.”
Alaska Airlines was also affected, with the company saying in a social media post: “A global outage today affected Microsoft’s Azure platform, where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted, causing disruption to key systems, including our websites… We are bringing affected systems back online this afternoon, and other services have resumed after Microsoft resolved the issue from their end.” They will be.”
Service appeared to be restored by Wednesday evening. Microsoft said the mass Azure outages were caused by “inadvertent configuration changes.”
At 1pm on Wednesday, the Azure support account on X confirmed the issue: “We are investigating an issue affecting several Azure services. Customers may experience issues accessing the services. Updates will be provided via Azure Status.”
London Heathrow Airport, NatWest and Vodafone also experienced disruptions. Even voting in the Scottish Parliament was suspended due to the shutdown.
The Holyrood boss said technical issues meant MSPs were unable to vote.
Dr Saqib Kakui, from the Department of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “This is very similar to last week’s AWS outage, which was also a DNS problem. Amazon, Microsoft and Google currently have a powerful triumvirate in cloud and storage services, which means that an outage to even one part of their infrastructure could cripple hundreds, if not thousands, of systems and thousands of applications.”
“Because of the cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to pooling resources in a few very large players, but it effectively puts all our eggs in one of three baskets,” Kakuy said.
As of Thursday morning, the status page said “There are no active events.”
The latest outage is the second major cloud outage in a two-week period. Last week, Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox and other major sites were taken offline due to technical issues with Amazon Web Services.
