Microsoft Azure Outage Affects Thousands Of Users: Here’s What The Company Said | Tech News

Microsoft Azure outage took down half of the internet for millions

Microsoft Azure faced a massive outage between October 29 and October 30 with many businesses in the US unable to run their operations for hours and waiting for the company to fix the issue. People were not able to access their workflow setup, authentication of tools and even the most important 365 admin center, which invariably got Microsoft in a huddle to get the systems back up and running at the earliest. 

The outage was tracked widely by platform Downdetector which saw a massive spike in reports from 9:23 PM IST on October 29 going well past the hour and waiting for the company to give some updates on the problem. 

Azure Outage Disrupts Half Of The Internet 

The outage tracker cited issues with the Azure website, server connections as well as the domains running on its network. Microsoft also relies on Azure to run its own Microsoft 365 and Outlook services that were also hugely affected across the US, India and other regions for many hours this week. 

Microsoft Azure Outage: What Caused It? 

Microsoft shared the details for the Azure outage which it claims lasted for around 8 hours, one of its biggest cyber issues since the Crowdstrike Windows 10 outage last year. The company said the latest outage was a result of a configuration error in the Azure Front Door which is its global traffic management system. 

The issues with the system meant that logins were not responding to the server requests which made it impossible for users to access their credentials and accounts during the period. The engineers at Microsoft were able to fix the issue by switching to the default state but even that took a toll on the systems rebooting back and becoming functional again. 

Microsoft needs Azure to power most of its customers and when the backbone of these businesses face issues, all of them come to a standstill. We’ve seen it happen recently with the AWS outage at Amazon which even saw people stuck with their smart home devices not working, let alone the regular business and shops.