Microsoft cloud customers face widespread disruptions

AFP/APP

Washington: Microsoft cloud customers faced major service disruptions on Wednesday after the company said an “inadvertent configuration change” affected its widely used Azure platform.

The issue, which began around 1600 GMT, disrupted Azure Front Door — Microsoft’s content delivery network service used by enterprise clients to enhance application performance.

In an update at 2230 GMT, Microsoft said it had completed the deployment of its “last known good” configuration. However, it warned that some users might continue to experience “intermittent failures” as systems recovered.

The company noted “strong signs of improvement” across affected regions and expected Azure operations to return to normal by 2320 GMT.

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According to the crowdsourced monitoring site DownDetector, the outage impacted a wide range of customer-facing services, including Xbox, Alaska Airlines, and retailer Costco.

Configuration changes are routine in tech operations — typically made to improve services, add new features, or fix bugs. However, even a minor configuration error can cascade across interconnected systems, causing widespread disruptions for cloud customers worldwide.

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

Just last week, Amazon’s cloud network (AWS) experienced a similar outage that disrupted major internet services, including streaming platforms, messaging apps, and banking systems.

AWS remains the global leader in cloud computing, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. Businesses, governments, and consumers around the world depend heavily on these networks for their daily digital operations.