Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble

Ready to talk it up to investors today, Redmond?

Updated Microsoft's cloud services are having a bad day with users worldwide reporting difficulty connecting to Azure.

According to the Windows giant's social media orifice for all things Microsoft 365-related, "We're currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features."

The problems appear to have started around 1130 UTC.

A glance at the Azure status dashboard indicates that all things Network Infrastructure-related are having issues on a global scale. The mega-corp's last message on the matter stated, "We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally. Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services. We have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue. More details will be provided as soon as possible."

In an unfortunate turn of events, no sooner had Microsoft's Azure Support mouthpiece suggested to users that they test their app's resilience with the Azure Chaos Studio, it appears the biz has kicked off its own chaos testing in production.

One UK-based Register reader noted glumly the outage "has broken most of our access to stuff."

"Can't access the portal which has stalled our development right now. I think prod is down also."

Another reader got in touch to tell us: "Initially access to the Portal wasn't possible. The attempted connection timed out. After a while, the message on the status page changed, and then I was able to connect to the portal, but only a very limited subset of my resources were visible.

"Basically, I could see Resource Groups, but none of the VMs, database servers etc. Those machines seem all to be up and working properly, but the portal isn't showing that they even exist."

It seems like a perfect excuse for a sunny afternoon in the pub — unless, of course, you actually need to get some work done while Azure staggers back to its feet.

The Register has contacted Microsoft to learn more about its latest outage.

The breakdown will doubtless trigger a cold sweat in admins after the events less than two weeks ago, in which an Azure wobble preceded the arrival of CrowdStrike's horseman of the borkpocalypse.

Reader Sam C said: "It looks like their Front Door CDN service is unavailable, for about the last 1.5 hours.. causing us all sorts of fun.. websites down, portals down (including service status portals!)"

He quipped: "As someone asked on Twitter, 'Have they just installed Crowdstrike'!"

Despite the experience of many of our readers (and so many others on various social media platforms), Microsoft's status pages continue to insist that all is well other than that pesky Network Infrastructure. Then again, if you can't access the Azure Portal, which appears to be the experience of many users, you'll likely struggle with other parts of the service.

Microsoft is scheduled to release its latest financial figures today, July 30. Apparently Azure will be a focus. Hopefully, the IT giant will manage to shoehorn how it intends to stop Azure from falling over in between all the AI-powered bragging. ®

Updated to add at 1445 UTC

Microsoft said it had implemented networking configuration changes and "have performed failovers to alternate networking paths to provide relief. Monitoring telemetry shows improvement in service availability, and we are continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery."

Screenshot of Microsoft's latest messaging on its Azure status page, indicating networking failures

There are still red hazard signs across the board.

Updated to add at 1509 UTC

MSFT says its telemetry has shown improvement in service availability "from approximately 14:10 UTC onwards, and we are continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery."

Updated to add at 1523 UTC

Now the UK court system has been borked by Azure!

HM Courts and Tribunals Service took to Xitter to say: "We are aware of users experiencing issues accessing multiple online services. This appears to relate to a global Microsoft Azure outage."

Ahem.

"We apologise for any inconvenience caused."

Updated to add at 1800 UTC

Microsoft has narrowed the outage down to its networking infrastructure and its CDN-like Azure Front Door service, which is left customers with "issues connecting to Microsoft services globally."

"An unexpected usage spike resulted in Azure Front Door (AFD) components performing below acceptable thresholds, leading to intermittent errors, timeout, and latency spikes," the tech goliath said, explaining that though it's fixing the issue even that is causing follow-up problems.

"We have implemented network configuration changes and have performed failovers to provide alternate network paths for relief," Microsoft said, promising a swift restoration of service.

"As we investigate reports of specific services and regions that are still experiencing intermittent errors, we believe that our network configuration changes have successfully mitigated the impacts of the usage spike, but that these changes are causing some side effects to certain services.

"We are updating our mitigation approach to minimize these side effects, and applying these following Safe Deployment Practices - beginning in Asia Pacific regions and then expanding in phases."