Microsoft has recovered all of its cloud services after a network issue that caused tens of thousands of users worldwide to be unable to access key services such as Teams and Outlook.
According to Downdetector, which tracks website outages, over 5,000 people in the UK reported problems with Outlook emails earlier today.
A network issue
After an hour of the reported disruption, the company identified the cause of the outage as a networking problem. In a statement it said, “We’ve identified a potential networking issue and are reviewing telemetry to determine the next troubleshooting steps.”
In a tweet, Microsoft said that it rolled back a network change that it believed was causing the issue. “We’ve rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact. We’re monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect,” it said.
Microsoft said it is still monitoring the recovery across the service, and some customers have reported improvements. Although some users are still experiencing issues, the number has decreased from thousands to hundreds worldwide.
Azure’s services were affected in various regions, including Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, with the exception of China and its platform for governments.
Increasing reliance on tech
With 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, an outage of Azure can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies that rely on the platform.
While Microsoft indicated that recovery efforts are underway. The disruption has caused significant inconvenience for the thousands of users who lost access to services, highlighting the dependence many of us have on big tech firms and the lack of control we have when their products fail.
Additionally, systems and networks are more vulnerable during maintenance or upgrades, as small errors or deviations from the plan can have widespread ripple effects as seen in this instance.
