Microsoft has deployed a fix to address an outage of its Azure cloud portal which left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services.
The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage and that a fix was being rolled out.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company acknowledged issues with its Azure Front Door, a global content and application delivery network, service on its status page and social media accounts.
An outage like this can have a widespread impact because many sites and services use Microsoft's cloud service.
On Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues throughout the day with Office 365, Minecraft, XBox Live, Copilot, Costco, Starbucks, and many other services.
Alaska Airline wrote on its X account that the outage was at the heart of problems affecting its systems, including check-in services.
Air New Zealand, the national airline has warned of travel delays because it could not process payments or digital boarding passes.
The websites for New Zealand's police and parliament were also among those taken down by the outage.
Microsoft's Azure troubles came just hours before the company was set to release its quarterly earnings report.
The outage also came just over a week after a massive outage of Amazon's cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which took down a broad range of online services including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
AWS revealed in a lengthy statement that a string of events triggered the outage.
It said the problems stemmed from a "latent defect" in what is known as the domain name system, or DNS.
This prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API, a cloud database that stores user information and other critical data.
Amazon is the dominant provider of cloud computing services but Microsoft ranks second, ahead of Google, in most markets.
AP/ABC
