Azure services fall over in Europe, Microsoft works on fix

One of these days we'll automate these outage articles with some kind of AI

Updated Microsoft's Azure portal and some related products are down right now for unlucky customers. The Windows giant is said to be working on a fix to bring systems back online.

The US tech titan warned on its status page that there are "issues accessing the Azure portal and other Microsoft services," and said it is "applying mitigation." The cloud started breaking down around about 1600 UTC (0900 PT), and Microsoft reckoned the outage is limited to customers in European regions.

The services caught up in the downtime include: Event Hubs, Key Vault, and Storage Accounts in Europe, and Microsoft Azure portal globally.

Judging from complaints from netizens and Register readers, folks in the UK, Europe, and India at least are feeling the effects. Azure's DNS backend is said to be suffering, meaning people can't access websites relying on Microsoft's technology.

"All my websites are down," said one chap. "Azure DNS name resolution problems again. That's twice today, and one about five or six weeks ago. What's going on?"

Another told us: "Azure DNS is down again, breaking their own sites and mine. This is becoming so regular. The Register, please keep the PR pressure on these clowns!"

In a note to customers, Microsoft said:

Starting at approximately 1600 UTC on 20 May 2021, a subset of customers within European regions have reported experiencing intermittent errors when trying to access the Azure portal and other Microsoft services.

It added at 1650 UTC it was working to correct the outage:

We have identified a transient issue impacting a backend service and we are actively scaling out our backend resources to mitigate the issue. More information will be provided within 60 minutes, or as events warrant.

El Reg has asked Microsoft for more info, and will let you know when we know more. The biz has just shaken off an Outlook outage caused by a bad software roll-out. ®

Updated to add

At 1719 UTC, Microsoft claimed the downtime was coming to an end: "As our scaling out operation progresses, some customers may begin to see recovery. Our telemetry is indicating that connection to services is returning to normal levels."