Internet users were left in the dark Wednesday as problems with Microsoft services triggered widespread outages across popular sites, such as Xbox, Kroger and Starbucks.
Tens of thousands of users reported experiencing outages with Microsoft Azure, the tech giant’s cloud platform, according to DownDetector.
Users of Minecraft, Xbox and Microsoft 365 — all owned by the tech giant — reported issues accessing websites. Other popular retailers, such as Kroger and Starbucks, were also caught up in the outage.
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience. At the moment, all banner sites and mobile apps are experiencing an unexpected outage. Our technical teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” Kroger wrote on X.
Alaska Airlines was also impacted, with the company said in a social media post: “A global outage impacted the Microsoft Azure platform today where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted, causing a disruption to key systems, including our websites...We are bringing impacted systems back online this afternoon, with other services set to resume once Microsoft resolves the issue from its end.”
Service appeared to have been restored by Wednesday evening. Azure’s mass outages resulted from an “inadvertent configuration change,” Microsoft said.
At 1 p.m. Wednesday, the Azure Support account on X acknowledged the issue: “We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services. Customers may experience issues when accessing services. Updates are provided via the Azure status.”
London’s Heathrow Airport, NatWest and Vodafone also encountered disruptions. Even voting at the Scottish Parliament was suspended following the outage.
Holyrood’s Presiding Officer said technical issues meant MSPs were unable to vote.
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 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,” Kakvi said.
By Thursday morning, the status page stated there were “ no active events.”
The latest blackout marked the second major cloud outage in a two-week span. Last week, Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox and other major sites were knocked offline by technical problems at Amazon Web Services.
