The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures – Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft started suffering disruptions at approximately noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was “an inadvertent configuration change.” The incident—which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks—highlights the volatility of an internet built mostly on infrastructure operated by a few big companies. The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
Microsoft’s difficulties primarily started from Azure’s Front Door content delivery network and appeared just hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings release. The firm website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft delivers updates was having sporadic troubles as well.
Microsoft revealed in status updates on Wednesday that it went through a process of gradually rolling back recent versions of its environment until it could locate the “last known good” configuration. At 3:01 pm ET, the business announced it had found and pushed this stable configuration and that “customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently restoring nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.” The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
A Microsoft spokeswoman said in a statement, “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to verify their Service Health Alerts.” The corporation did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about the nature of the configuration update that prompted the outage.
In addition to occurring on Microsoft’s results day, the disruption comes nine days after Azure rival Amazon Web Services had a huge outage that impacted sites and services around the world. Major cloud providers, commonly called “hyperscalers,” standardize and frequently improve baseline security and dependability for their customers, but faults and outages can cause them to become single points of failure for vast populations of vital digital services The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
“Even Azure’s outage status page is down,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a seasoned security operations and compliance manager and a vice president at the data infrastructure startup Inrupt. “Another configuration change error—we are in the age of integrity breach more so now than ever.” The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
Azure stopped customers from making configuration changes to their instances while it worked to address the issue.
The business said in a status report at 3:22 pm ET that it anticipated “full mitigation” of the situation by 7:20 pm ET. “Organizations may think they’re insulated by their choice of cloud provider, but dependencies run deeper,” says Munish Walther-Puri, an adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and the former director of cyber risk for the city of New York. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of vital infrastructure, these disruptions illustrate the brittleness of our digital backbone.” The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
About the Author
