On Wednesday, Microsoft (MS) experienced a significant outage in its Azure cloud services, causing widespread disruption for customers globally, including Alaska Airlines, Xbox users, and Microsoft 365 subscribers.
Reuters, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and GeekWire reported that Azure services partially went down around 11:40 a.m. Eastern Time. Microsoft officially acknowledged the service disruption at approximately 4:00 p.m. the same day. The tech giant stated that they were actively investigating the root cause of the outage and continuing their recovery efforts.
The Azure outage impacted major systems, including websites, for several high-profile organizations. Alaska Airlines, Vodafone in the UK, and Heathrow Airport all reported disruptions to their operations. Popular social media platforms and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, also experienced service interruptions.
This service failure occurred at an inopportune moment for MS, coming just before their scheduled quarterly earnings announcement. The incident follows a similar outage last week affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), which temporarily crippled access to major online platforms. Among those affected were the fintech app Robinhood, messaging service Snapchat, and the artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot Perplexity.