Microsoft deploys fix after global Azure outage affects Minecraft, Xbox and BT

Microsoft says users of its Azure cloud portal may be not be able to access Office 365, Minecraft or other services due to issues with its global content delivery network services. Credit: AP

Microsoft's Azure cloud portal was down for thousands of users on Wednesday, leaving people unable to access services including Office 365, Minecraft, Teams and WhatsApp.

Downdetector, a website which tracks complaints about online services, showed a spike in reports on Wednesday evening, including more than 2,000 reports at Xbox and at least 500 reports for Microsoft Outlook by 6pm.

Microsoft Azure, the technology giant’s cloud platform, said it had discovered the cause of the issue affecting some of its services and has rolled out a fix.

It said users may not be able to access its admin centre and might see delays when using other 365 services, but added that it expects its services to be recovered by 11.20pm.

Because so many sites and services use Microsoft’s cloud service, an outage like this one can have a widespread impact.

Microsoft's cloud service is used by a host of sites and services. Voting was suspended at the Scottish Parliament following the outage, as Holyrood’s Presiding Officer said technical issues meant MSPs were unable to vote.

Microsoft's Azure troubles came just hours before the company was set to release its quarterly earnings report, and just over a week after a massive outage of Amazon’s cloud computing service took down a broad range of online services.

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Dr Saqib Kakvi, from the department of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “This is very similar to the AWS outage of last week, which was also a DNS (Domain Name System) issue.

“Currently, Amazon, Microsoft and Google have an effective triopoly on cloud services and storage, meaning that an outage of even part of their infrastructure can cripple hundreds, if not thousands, of applications and systems.

“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”

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