If you’ve encountered difficulties accessing websites and applications today, the root cause may be traced back to a significant outage affecting Microsoft Azure. While this disruption does not reach the severity of the recent CrowdStrike boot-loop incident, it has nonetheless impacted a variety of major companies reliant on Azure’s network infrastructure.
Customers may have experienced issues connecting to Microsoft services globally.
Microsoft has attributed the outage to complications within its network infrastructure, specifically involving the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) and the Azure Front Door service. These issues have led to connectivity problems for customers around the globe. The troubles began around 11:45 UTC on a day when Microsoft is set to unveil its latest financial results.
According to Microsoft, “An unexpected usage spike resulted in Azure Front Door (AFD) and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) components performing below acceptable thresholds, leading to intermittent errors, timeout, and latency spikes.” The company provided an update at 19:00 UTC, indicating that they had implemented network configuration changes and executed failovers to create alternative network paths, which began to show improvement in service availability from approximately 14:10 UTC onward.
Interestingly, while the resolution efforts are underway, they may inadvertently cause additional disruptions. Microsoft elaborated, stating, “We continue to investigate and mitigate reports of specific services and regions that are still experiencing intermittent errors. While our previous network configuration changes successfully mitigated the impacts of the usage spike, these changes caused side effects for a small number of services.” The company is now applying a phased approach to address these issues, targeting regions in the Americas, with expectations of full mitigation by 20:30 UTC.
Impact on Services
The instability of Azure has already made its mark on various services. Mojang, the developer behind the popular game Minecraft, acknowledged that users “may experience some intermittent failures connecting to our services due to issues with Azure.” Given that Minecraft requires users to authenticate their accounts before gameplay, any disruption in these authentication services can halt playtime.
A personal attempt to install the Windows version of Minecraft revealed that the launcher produced an error message, while the Java version failed to launch, likely due to the ongoing downtime affecting the Microsoft Store amidst the Azure breakdown.
Microsoft 365 has also been affected, with reports indicating that users are experiencing issues. Although there have been whispers regarding potential outages with Xbox Live, the official Xbox status page currently reports no problems. Users are encouraged to share their experiences in the comments section.
Unity, the game creation engine, has reported challenges with Azure that are hindering downloads and uploads. Similarly, MongoDB and Moesif have noted that the Azure outage has caused disruptions for their respective Cloud and web portal services. MongoDB stated, “This is causing degraded health of some Atlas Clusters globally,” with some clusters potentially being inaccessible.
Microsoft-owned GitHub experienced issues with its Codespaces tool around 09:30 EST, followed by DocuSign, which noticed problems with its Rooms feature shortly thereafter. Both companies attributed the disruptions to an outage at a third party, presumably Azure, although this has not been officially confirmed. Notably, both GitHub and DocuSign reported that the issues were resolved around the same time, suggesting that Microsoft is making strides in restoring Azure services.
In a related note, Starbucks reportedly faced difficulties with its mobile app, although the coffee giant has yet to respond to inquiries regarding a possible connection to Azure. The timing of complaints about Starbucks on Downdetector aligns closely with those regarding Microsoft 365, hinting at a potential correlation.