Microsoft Azure, 365 outage impacting businesses globally starting to ease

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An outage at Microsoft's Azure and its suite of productivity software, affecting a range of industries worldwide, had begun to ease, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

Alaska Airlines said on Wednesday it is experiencing a disruption to key systems, including its website, due to the Azure outage, along with Vodafone in the UK and Heathrow Airport.

The Microsoft outage follows last week's disruption at Amazon AWS, which caused global turmoil among thousands of sites and some of the web's most popular apps, such as Snapchat and Reddit.

Microsoft 365 said its services were experiencing downstream impact related to the Azure outage. A recent configuration change to a portion of Azure infrastructure is causing the outage, it said on its status page.

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Beginning at about 12  p.m. ET, Azure said its customers and Microsoft services that leverage Azure Front Door, a global cloud-based content and application delivery network, had experienced issues resulting in timeouts and errors.

Azure, on its status page, said that customers also had faced problems accessing the Azure management portal and that it has taken action to mitigate the issue.

The number of users reporting issues with Azure had come down to 3,299 users as of 1:27 p.m. ET, from a peak of over 18,000, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.

"Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly, while all portal extensions are working correctly there may be a small number of endpoints that might have a problem loading (i.e. Marketplace)," Azure said.

The outage at Microsoft 365 had eased to 3,858 users reporting issues as of 1:27 p.m. ET, down from nearly 11,700 earlier, Downdetector's website showed. Its numbers are based on user-submitted reports and the actual number of affected users may vary.

The AWS outage was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.

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