(Updates with more details of the fall)
By Akriti Sharma
Jan 25 (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday it had restored all its cloud services after a network outage knocked out its Azure cloud platform along with apps like Teams and Outlook used by millions of people. Worldwide.
The Azure status page showed that services were affected in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not affected.
Late in the morning Azure said that most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of Microsoft’s wide area network (WAN).
An outage to Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and more than 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, could affect multiple services and create a ripple effect, as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform.
Businesses are increasingly relying on online platforms after the pandemic caused an increase in the number of employees working from home.
Previously, Microsoft said that it had determined that a network connectivity issue with devices over the Microsoft WAN was occurring. This affects connectivity between clients on the Internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centers, he said.
Microsoft later tweeted that it had rolled back a network change it believed 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 outage, but data from the outage tracking website Downdetector showed thousands of incidents on all continents.
The Downdetector site tracks outages by collecting status reports from various sources, including users.
Microsoft’s cloud business had helped shore up its fiscal second-quarter profit on Tuesday.
The company forecast third-quarter revenue in its so-called intelligent cloud business to be between $21.7 billion and $22 billion, despite concerns that the lucrative cloud segment for big tech companies could be hit hard by cutting customer costs.
Azure’s share of the cloud computing market rose to 30% by 2022, behind Amazon’s AWS, according to estimates by BofA Global Research.
Microsoft joined other big tech companies that have resorted to layoffs to weather the weak economy, announcing last week that it was cutting more than 10,000 jobs.
Its shares were down 2.4% in trading prior to the opening of the session.
Big tech platform outages are not uncommon, as various companies from Google to Meta have experienced service outages. Azure, the second largest cloud service provider after Amazon, suffered outages last year.
During the outage, users had trouble exchanging messages, participating in calls, or using any feature of the Teams app. Many users took to Twitter to share updates about the outage, with #MicrosoftTeams trending on the social network.
Other affected services include Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, according to the company’s status page.
(Reporting by Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm, additional reporting by Sinead Cruise in London; Writing by Charlie Devereux; Editing in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)
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