Microsoft’s cloud services have been restored after a major outage that caused widespread disruptions across critical infrastructures and industries.
The company revealed customers in its Central US region had been experiencing multiple issues with Azure services and Microsoft 365 apps.
“Starting at approximately 21:56 UTC on 18 Jul 2024, a subset of customers may experience issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region including failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services," Microsoft said in a statement.
Major Microsoft outage
Microsoft shared information about the cause of the outage on its status page: “A backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the Central US region.”
The outage had widespread consequences, including the grounding of hundreds of flights from major aviation firms like American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines.
Frontier Airlines confirmed that booking services, check-in and boarding pass access were all affected by the Microsoft outage, leading to delays and cancellations. The company cancelled 147 flights and delayed a further 212, while Allegiant Air and Sun Country delayed 45% and 23% of their flights respectively.
Microsoft’s status table shows restored operation across its Central US region as of Friday, July 19.
A separate Microsoft Cloud status page shows service degradation across Microsoft 365 apps and services, which has also been attributed to a configuration change. PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 admin center continue to be degraded.
TechRadar Pro has asked Microsoft to comment on the extent and scope of its outage, but we have not received an immediate response.
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