Reuters
—
Microsoft (MSFT) said on Wednesday it had recovered all of its cloud services after a network outage took down its Azure cloud platform as well as services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions of people around the world.
Azure’s status page showed that services were affected in Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not affected.
Late morning, Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of Microsoft’s wide area network (WAN).
An outage of Azure, which has 15 million enterprise customers and more than 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as nearly all of the largest companies in the world use the platform.
Businesses have become increasingly reliant on online platforms after the pandemic prompted a shift to more employees working from home.
Earlier, Microsoft said it determined that a network connectivity issue was occurring with devices on the Microsoft WAN. This impacts connectivity between customers on the internet and Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centers, he said.
Microsoft then tweeted that it had rolled back a network change it said was causing the problem and was using “additional infrastructure to speed up the recovery process.”
Microsoft did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed thousands of incidents across continents.
The Downdetector site tracks outages by gathering status reports from various sources, including users.
Microsoft’s cloud business helped shore up its fiscal second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. It forecast third-quarter revenue from its so-called smart cloud business to be $21.7 billion to $22 billion, despite fears that the lucrative cloud segment of big tech companies could be hit hard as customers seek to cut their bills. expenses.
Azure’s share of the cloud computing market has grown to 30% in 2022, behind Amazon’s AWS, according to BofA Global Research estimates.
Microsoft has joined other big tech companies in turning to layoffs to ride out the weak economy, announcing last week that it was cutting more than 10,000 jobs.
Its shares were down 2.4% in premarket trading.
Big Tech platform outages are not uncommon as several companies ranging from Google to Meta have experienced service outages. Azure, the second-largest cloud service provider after Amazon, faced outages last year.
During the outage, users experienced issues exchanging messages, joining calls, or using Teams app features. Many users took to Twitter to share updates on the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
Microsoft Teams, used by more than 280 million people worldwide, is an integral part of daily operations for businesses and schools, who use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organize their workflow.
There were few signs of major disruption at major UK-based financial services companies, where several messaging apps from vendors such as Movius and Symphony are being used alongside Microsoft Teams to connect bankers with customers and office staff with colleagues working remotely.
Two London-based sources, working at two major global banks, said they hadn’t even noticed a problem.
Deutsche Boerse Group, which runs the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, said there was no impact on trading. Frankfurt-based Commerzbank AG (CRZBF) (CBKG) said in a statement that Microsoft is investigating several issues affecting the bank.
Other affected services included Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, according to the company’s status page.