Microsoft Corp on Jan 25 was hit with a networking outage, which impacted its Teams and Outlook applications.
Both of these are a part of its cloud platform Azure, which is used by more than 280 million people globally. Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit, according to a Reuters report.
“An outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure can impact a variety of services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform. We’ve determined the network connectivity issue is occurring with devices across the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN),” Microsoft said. This impacts connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in datacenters, it said. Microsoft added in a tweet it had rolled back a network change that it believed was causing the issue. “We’re monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect,” it said.
Microsoft did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed thousands of incidents distributed across continents. This is not the first time that Big Tech platforms were affected by an outage.
In 2022, Twitter faced an outage. According to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages through collating status reports from a number of sources, more than 27,000 users had reported Twitter outages.
