Microsoft Hit By Another Outage Days After CrowdStrike Outage

Barely two weeks after one of the major CrowdStrike outages disrupted Windows systems worldwide, another outage has rocked the world. No, this isn’t CrowdStrike again but rather Microsoft is facing a bad day with thousands of reports coming from various social media sites as users are facing difficulty accessing Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure is Down But Remedial Actions are Working

The problem started appearing at 1130 UTC on July 30 after users saw a ‘network infrastructure’ error on the Azure status dashboard. Soon, thousands of reports started flowing in from other parts of the world giving away the extent of this outage. It is surprising since just two weeks ago, millions of Windows systems were down after a faulty update was released by engineers at CrowdStrike across their Falcon 2024 EDR systems.

Coming back to Microsoft, the outage has disrupted various services including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Outlook, and OneDrive for Business to name a few. One of the readers at The Register quipped “Did Microsoft just install CrowdStrike?”.

Image Credits: DownDetector

We just checked Microsoft Status Dashboard and it says everything is working fine. This could be the remedial steps in the works that Microsoft took to fix the networking configuration providing relief to the systems by performing failovers to alternate networking paths. Luckily, we at RA Technologies didn’t face any disruptions as of the time of writing this.

It Wasn’t a Faulty Update But an Unexpected Usage Spike

According to Microsoft, it wasn’t a faulty update (which was in the case of CrowdStrike) but rather the outage was triggered due to an unexpected usage spike that affected Azure Front Door (AFD) components to perform below acceptable thresholds. This led to latency spikes, timeout, and other intermittent errors and soon, the problem was spotted in other parts of the world affecting multiple Microsoft systems alike.

Redmond-based giant Microsoft discovered the problem and implemented changes in an attempt to restore services, however, it acknowledged certain services facing side effects due to the network configuration changes. The software giant is taking mitigation steps to reduce instances of side effects starting with Asia Pacific regions and soon, it will be relayed to other parts of the world in phases.

Interestingly, this Microsoft outage comes just a few hours before the tech giant is set to announce its financial reports. It remains to be seen how the outage affects people’s response to the financial reports especially when Microsoft is pushing hard towards adopting AI to the core. For more information, you can visit MO842351 in the admin center.

Source: DownDetector | Via: The Register, Mint