Widespread Azure Outage Affects Microsoft 365, Xbox, and NatWest

Strategic Insights -

Microsoft's Azure cloud platform is experiencing a severe outage that has impacted various websites, services, and apps, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and NatWest. The disruption has also halted voting at the Scottish Parliament. According to Microsoft, the issue is caused by an inadvertent configuration change to a portion of Azure's infrastructure, which is being rolled back to a previous backup known to be functioning correctly.

Key Takeaways:

  • The outage was caused by an inadvertent configuration change to a portion of Azure's infrastructure.
  • Microsoft has halted the rollout of the impacting configuration change and is deploying a previous healthy configuration to the affected infrastructure.
  • The company is rerouting affected traffic to alternate healthy infrastructure as a near-term resolution.
  • Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure management portal, but the portal has been failed away from AFD to mitigate these access issues.
  • Customers may also consider implementing failover strategies using Azure Traffic Manager to redirect traffic from Azure Front Door to their origin servers as an interim measure.
  • Microsoft has not provided an estimated time for full mitigation but will provide another update within 30 minutes once the deployment has completed.

Statistics:

  • The outage has affected multiple websites and services, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and NatWest.
  • The disruption has also halted voting at the Scottish Parliament.
  • Microsoft has stated that it is experiencing connectivity issues with portions of its internal infrastructure, which are being unblocked and redistributed to support recovery.
  • The deployment of the last known good configuration is expected to complete within 30 minutes.

Sources:

  • Microsoft's Azure status page
  • "We've identified a recent configuration change to a portion of Azure infrastructure which we believe is causing the impact." - Microsoft update
  • "We're halting the rollout of the impacting configuration change. We're continuing to route service traffic away from affected infrastructure to recover service availability." - Microsoft update
  • "Some customers may also have experienced issues accessing the Azure management portal. We have failed the portal away from AFD to mitigate these access issues." - Microsoft update