Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft started suffering outages at roughly noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was “an inadvertent configuration change.” The incident—which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks—highlights the instability of an internet built largely on infrastructure run by a few tech giants.
Microsoft’s problems specifically originated from Azure’s Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings announcement. The company website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was having intermittent issues as well.
Microsoft described in status updates on Wednesday that it went through a process of sequentially rolling back recent versions of its environment until it could pinpoint the “last known good” configuration. At 3: 01 pm ET, the company said it had identified and pushed this stable configuration and that “customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their Se