If you're running into errors trying to visit certain websites or use online services right now, you're not alone. That's because Microsoft Azure — the company's cloud computing platform that it and many other companies use for sites, programs, games, and more — has gone down, leading to widespread outages for a variety of services.
Downdetector — a site that aggregates reports of issues experienced with online services in real-time — began to signal that Azure and everything that relies on it was experiencing a severe outage on Wednesday morning, and issues with affected services remain ongoing.
Microsoft is aware of the problem and is actively working on resolving it, with updates coming at timed intervals on the firm's Azure status page.
"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. In addition, customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal," wrote the company. "Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation."
"We are actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure," it continued. "Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues."
The TL;DR? Microsoft is doing everything it can to find the root of the issue and take care of it so that Azure and everything that uses it can resume normal operation. Until that happens, though, all users can do is wait for a fix.
Some services hit by Azure's outage include the online functionality of Microsoft's own Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook, as well as the business messaging and collaboration program Microsoft Teams, its AI assistant Microsoft Copilot, and the network of its Xbox gaming brand.
Some others are specific games such as the ever-popular Minecraft, digital services for Capital One banking, Starbucks, Costco, Xfinity, Walmart, and many other different programs and brands.
Even the launch of The Outer Worlds 2 has been affected, with many customers currently unable to purchase or install Obsidian Entertainment's new Xbox RPG as a result of the Azure troubles. Considering that The Outer Worlds 2 is one of Microsoft's biggest Xbox and Xbox Game Pass releases this year, it's quite unfortunate that its arrival has been hamstrung by this outage.
Some services hit by Azure's outage include the online functionality of Microsoft's own Office 365 apps, Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and Xbox, among others.
With any luck, we'll see a full resolution come sooner rather than later, though ultimately, only time will tell what happens. Microsoft is now in the process of rolling Azure services back to the "last known good state," which may or may not fix the problem. Hopefully it will.
It's worth noting that this Azure outage comes a little over a week after Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, resulting in tons of different services, websites, and games going down in a similar manner. Azure going down hasn't affected quite as much, but even so, we've had some strong reminders of just how reliant the tools and programs we use on a day-to-day basis are on a select few platforms in recent times.
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