Azure Outage Takes Down Microsoft 365, Xbox, and More, But Company Says It's in Recovery

An outage involving Microsoft's Azure has significantly impacted many of the company's products and services, as well as others that rely on the cloud platform.

Azure Outage Takes Down 365, Xbox, 'Minecraft'

Engadget reported that Microsoft's Azure cloud platform faced an outage as a surge of reports online and via DownDetector reported about the problem. Microsoft later confirmed on Azure's status page that the outage started around the same time as the reports popped up.

Users reported seeing long and unending load times for the Xbox Game Pass service when the outage occurred, and many were left withlimited access to it. Additionally, users who use the Microsoft 365 platform were also left without access to various enterprise and productivity apps under the service.

Some user reports claimed that various airline websites were also down, believing it to be connected to the Azure outage. Moreover, one of the biggest games in the world under Azure's service, "Minecraft," also experienced the brunt of the outage, with gamers claiming server connection issues on DownDetector.

Microsoft Says Azure Is Now in Recovery

Microsoft's latest update on Azure's status page claimed that its systems have been in recovery, with customers set to experience its initial signs.

The company has yet to reveal the reason behind Azure's recent outage, but the good thing is that the platform and its affected service are now back online.

Microsoft Azure Operations

Microsoft Azure is one of the largest cloud computing platforms in the world, which serves as a host to multiple websites and platform clients and has mostly powered Microsoft's services. However, an outage to the service proved to be a massive hassle for users globally, with one of its infamous issues taking place in 2023, which lasted for 10.5 hours because of a typo bug in its snapshot deletion job.

Last year, Microsoft's massive expansion into AI also brought a significant feature for Azure, which centers on a facial recognition technology that uses machine learning, but it has been a controversial one in the industry. The United States Police has been banned from using Azure's AI facial recognition tech by Microsoft despite its advanced capabilities, following criticisms from the public.

Microsoft's Azure cloud service is known for its multiple uses and availability to clients and continues to be one of the top cloud computing platforms present in the industry alongside the likes of Amazon's AWS.

That said, an outage like the most recent one for Azure significantly impacts many services under it, but the good thing is that Microsoft is quick to acknowledge the issue and fix its problems.