Microsoft Azure Outage Disrupts Xbox and 365 Services
▼ Summary
– Microsoft Azure is experiencing a DNS-related outage affecting services including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and Minecraft.
– The outage began around 12PM ET (16:00 UTC) and Microsoft is actively investigating the underlying issue.
– Microsoft confirmed Azure Portal access problems and expects to resolve portal issues shortly while continuing broader mitigation efforts.
– Reports of service issues spiked on DownDetector and appear to be affecting users globally, including in the US and UK.
– This Azure outage occurs just one week after AWS experienced similar issues and hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings report.
A significant disruption to Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure has caused widespread service outages, impacting a range of popular platforms including Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, and Minecraft. This incident occurs merely a week after a separate Amazon Web Services failure created similar internet-wide disturbances, highlighting the cascading effects that cloud service interruptions can have on global digital operations.
Microsoft officially acknowledged problems with the Azure Portal on its service status dashboard. The company indicated the outage commenced at approximately 16:00 UTC, which corresponds to 12:00 PM Eastern Time. According to their initial statement, the root cause involved DNS issues that led to a degradation in availability for numerous services. The statement confirmed that customers were likely encountering difficulties accessing the Azure Portal and that immediate action had been taken to resolve the portal access problems. An active investigation into the underlying cause is underway, with Microsoft promising further updates within an hour.
At 12:25 PM ET, the official Microsoft 365 status account on the social media platform X posted that the company was looking into user reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and its admin center. The post did not elaborate on the specific nature of the technical failure. Concurrently, the official Xbox status page was itself inaccessible, failing to load for users attempting to check the service’s health.
The timing of this outage is particularly notable, as it unfolded just hours before Microsoft was scheduled to announce its quarterly earnings results. The confluence of a major service disruption and a critical financial reporting event placed the company under intense scrutiny. News outlets contacted Microsoft for additional comment but had not received an immediate response as the situation developed.
Independent outage tracking websites, such as DownDetector, showed a massive spike in user problem reports starting around noon ET. These reports coincided with a flood of complaints regarding access to Microsoft 365 and Xbox services. Evidence suggests the outage had a global reach, with Reddit users from both the United States and the United Kingdom confirming their inability to reach the Azure portal and other dependent services. The situation remains fluid as engineers work to implement a full resolution.
(Source: The Verge)
