Microsoft’s Azure, one of the world’s biggest cloud service providers, is suffering outages, triggering widespread internet disruptions across major companies.
According to Downdetector, problems began around 11:30am ET, with reports surging from users who could not access cloud-connected services, websites or apps.
The outage appears to be affecting dozens of platforms that rely on these cloud networks, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, Outlook, Starbucks, Costco and Kroger.
Even popular developer and data tools like Blackbaud and Minecraft are showing connectivity issues.
Downdetector has received nearly 20,000 issue reports from Azure users in the US.
The Microsoft outage comes just days after Amazon Web Services disrupted ‘half the internet.’
The incidents have raised concerns about how much of the global online infrastructure depends on these two companies, which host everything from retail and entertainment platforms to business operations and cloud storage.
Frustrated users have flooded social media to vent, with one post on X reading: ‘First AWS, now Azure goes down. I love it when big companies own half the internet!!!’
According to Downdetector, problems began around 11:30am ET, with reports surging from users who couldn’t access cloud-connected services, websites or apps
Downdetector gets network status updates from social media platforms, reports submitted to its website and other sources around the web.
It ‘only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day,’ the website reads.
Microsoft Azure posted an update noting that customers reported issues around 12pm ET, which were due to a part of the internet system that helps computers find websites (called DNS) being having problems.
‘Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal,’ the alert reads.
‘We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly.
‘We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions.’
While Microsoft has not released data on the exact number of companies using Azure, analysts have suggested there are more than 550,000 using the platform.
Downdetector has received nearly 20,000 issue reports from Azure users in the US
The simultaneous failure of AWS earlier this month and Azure is particularly alarming, as the two companies power much of the global internet infrastructure, responsible for hosting everything from retail and entertainment to business operations and cloud storage
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.
‘Given the scale of these issues and the entities involved, it may be an issue of BGP, which is a protocol that works with DNS to allow the discovery of web services.
‘The update at 12:17 p.m. EST stating ‘an inadvertent configuration change’ may support this, as BGP configuration issues have previously been known to cause such effects.
‘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 the 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.
