Microsoft Azure and its productivity software suite began recovering Wednesday from brief service disruptions that affected thousands of users, with Reuters reporting declining problem reports following the company's implementation of multiple remediation strategies.
The Wednesday disruptions followed last week's Amazon AWS outage that caused worldwide chaos across thousands of sites including popular applications such as Snapchat and Reddit, according to Reuters. A recent configuration change to portions of Azure infrastructure triggered the service problems, with Microsoft 365 confirming downstream impacts on its applications, Reuters stated.
Microsoft 365 announced "We're pursuing multiple remediation strategies, including moving traffic away from the impacted infrastructure and blocking the offending change," Reuters reported from the company's status page communications.
By 1:07 p.m. ET, Microsoft 365 issues had declined to 4,332 users from nearly 11,700 earlier, while Azure problems dropped to 4,584 users from over 18,000 at peak levels, Reuters stated, citing Downdetector tracking data. Users encountered difficulties with the Microsoft 365 admin center, experienced delays accessing services, and faced Outlook problems including add-in and network connectivity issues, according to Reuters.
Azure's status page indicated the company had addressed customer access problems with the Azure Portal while continuing to investigate the underlying issue and evaluate additional mitigation actions, Reuters noted. Downdetector's figures derive from user-submitted reports, with actual affected user numbers potentially varying.
Last week's AWS disruption represented the most significant internet outage since the previous year's CrowdStrike malfunction that disabled technology systems across hospitals, banks and airports, exposing vulnerabilities in interconnected global technologies, Reuters reported.
