If you're having trouble logging on to Microsoft services this morning, you're not alone.
A major outage across the company's platform's appears to take place earlier today, with issues with Azure knocking out Microsoft 365 services - and even Minecraft and Xbox are affected.
This story is still developing, but we're tracking it now, and will post updates below as they emerge...
Refresh
Just a few minutes ago at 2:11 PM ET, the Azure status page received this update:
"We have initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration. This is expected to be fully deployed in about 30 minutes, after which customers will start to see initial signs of recovery. Once this is completed, the next stage is to start to recover nodes while we route traffic through these healthy nodes."
And that's a start on good news, as Azure is deploying its 'last known good configuration' which should hit customs in about 30 minutes, and recovery might start then. We're keeping an eye on further updates to the status.
As promised, Microsoft now says things are starting to recover...
"Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly, while all portal extensions are working correctly there may be a small number of endpoints that might have a problem loading (i.e. Marketplace)," the latest update says.
They've found the culprit - Microsoft says, "We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue."
Chalk that one up to experience, I guess!
Another update from Microsoft - and it thinks it has found the problem.
"We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state."
"We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to mitigate the portal access issues. Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly."
"We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update."
Reports are definitely tailing off now - so hopefully this means Microsoft's work is paying off, and things will be back up and running soon.
Microsoft has issued another update, and it's working hard on a solution, it seems.
"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. In addition. customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation."
"We are actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure. Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.
Fortunately, it seems numbers are dropping across the board - there are still reports of issues at Microsoft 365, and customers including Starbucks, but they're nowhere near as high as a few minutes ago, so we're hopeful the worst may be over.
We're still waiting for another update from Microsoft though...
Reports do seem to be tailing off concerning issues at Azure, with DownDetector showing a dropoff - could the outage be over already?
Given the chaos caused by the recent AWS outage, that could be a major relief for everyone...
"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues resulting in availability degradation of some services. Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly. We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner."
Reports continue to flood in from Microsoft 365 users, with DownDetector's spike growing ever larger.
This is the start of the working day for many in the central and Western United States, so having all these users log on at once probably isn't helping the issue at all...
(Image credit: DownDetector)
It's not just apps and services that are affected either - it looks like even the Microsoft Store is down too.
Or is Microsoft just doing an Apple, and is about to surprise launch a whole load of new phones?
(Image credit: DownDetector)
Worryingly, it looks like some major Microsoft customers might also be affected, as DownDetector is showing outage spikes at Starbucks, Kroger, Costco.
In case you needed reminding, Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, so forms the backbone of not only the company's own services, but many customers as well.
Microsoft 365 is your one-stop office software shop, including popular tools such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Teams and much more.
Basically, if either of these have an issue, it's bad news all round...
DownDetector is showing major spikes across Microsoft services as this outage catches hold...
(Image credit: DownDetector)
The official Azure status page is now saying that there is an issue, and it is being investigated.
"We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal," the site says, noting more information will be provided shortly.
Welcome to our coverage of this outage - not long ago, we saw huge spikes in reports on outage tracker DownDetector, with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 all affected.
