While the world was focused on the widespread AWS outage – an issue that Amazon denied – Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, experienced a massive, hours-long service outage too in the late hours of Wednesday, bringing down critical IT infrastructure of global companies and crippling several of the tech giant’s own services. The disruption, which Microsoft later attributed to an “inadvertent configuration change,” affected a major chunk of the internet, affecting everything from travel logistics and retail to online gaming.
In the aviation sector, Alaska Airlines reported “disruption to key systems,” including customer check-in services and its primary website. Similarly, the main website for London’s Heathrow Airport was inaccessible for a period.
The outage also hit financial and retail giants, too, with websites and apps for institutions like NatWest and Vodafone in the UK, as well as Starbucks and the Costco website in the US, were among the services rendered unusable. Millions of gamers were locked out of services like Xbox Live and Microsoft’s own Minecraft, with studios like Obsidian Entertainment tweeting about the unavailability of games running on Azure.
Microsoft Azure outage crippled several services
According to Microsoft’s status dashboard, engineers identified the cause as a configuration error within a segment of the Azure cloud infrastructure. In order to mitigate the fault, Microsoft resorted to “rolling back to our last known good state.”
After a notable period of monitoring and troubleshooting that forced Microsoft to revise its estimated recovery time, the cloud operator confirmed in the late hours of Wednesday that the issues arising from the configuration change were fully resolved.
Although the services are back online, all business partners relying on Azure services had to witness a financial fallout. An analyst from Support My Website estimated that the cost to Microsoft’s gaming division alone was approximately $1.2 million per hour. Note that this figure does not include the massive losses sustained by the multiple third-party businesses that were taken offline by the critical infrastructure failure.
With nearly 20 percent of the global cloud market running on Azure, it goes on to remind us how fragile modern service ecosystems are. The Azure failure follows a similar but separate cloud issue that plagued Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the span of a week, affecting several global names around the world.
