Week after Amazon outage, Microsoft users face massive cloud service disruptions

As the outage saga continues, several Microsoft cloud customers faced disruptions in services on Wednesday due to what the company called an “inadvertent configuration change” that hit its widely used Azure service.

The bug began affecting systems at 1600 GMT and impacted Azure Front Door, Microsoft’s content delivery network service, which enterprises use to enhance their application performance.

Microsoft gave an update to its client at 2230 GMT, where it said that it had finished deploying its “last known good” configuration, adding that some users may experience “intermittent failures” as the system recovers.

What happened?

The crowdsourced outage tracker DownDetector reported widespread disruptions affecting numerous consumer websites, such as Xbox, Alaska Airlines, and Costco.

Adjustments to system configurations are a normal part of tech operations; organisations implement them regularly to enhance performance, introduce new capabilities, or resolve existing issues.

Although routine, small errors in configuration can snowball into outages owing to the interconnectivity of systems that are spread almost instantly to cloud customers worldwide.

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“We are currently recovering nodes and re-routing traffic through healthy nodes across our fleet. This recovery effort involves reloading configurations and rebalancing traffic across a large number of nodes to restore full operational scale,” Microsoft said.

Amazon outage

Last week, popular internet services ranging from streaming platforms to messaging services to banking were offline for hours due to an outage in Amazon’s crucial cloud network, illustrating the extent to which internet life depends on the tech titan.

The disruption affected streaming platforms, including Amazon’s Prime Video service and Disney+, as well as Perplexity AI, the Fortnite game, Airbnb, Snapchat and Duolingo.

Mobile telephone services and messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp were affected in Europe, according to Downdetector.

People also reported problems reaching websites, including Amazon’s own e-commerce shop.

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Some banks, such as Lloyd’s, were also impacted and pointed to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform as the source.

Amazon said on a status page that the system at issue was back to “pre-event levels”, but it could take hours to work through the data backlog caused by the problem.

With inputs from agencies