Microsoft services partly down Down Under for Kiwi users

Maybe time to play the cloud hokey pokey? You put your workload in. You take your workload out...

Updated Microsoft Azure went down for customers in New Zealand earlier today, taking with it parts of Microsoft 365 and bite-sized chunks of the working day for employees still dealing with the effects of previous outages.

The Windows giant admitted that there were issues with Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, for users in New Zealand and had to reroute traffic to alternate infrastructure before it saw "improvements in service ability."

Approximately four hours later, the company said everything was up and running normally again, but not before it had caused mild panic attacks in administrators picking up the pieces from Azure's earlier crash from the clouds, and the CrowdStrike incident less than two weeks before.

It sounds a lot like issues with the infrastructure related to user authentication. Users reported being unable to sign into Azure accounts. Services such as Teams were also down for affected users.

The outage was localized and affected only a subset of users. Thanks to VPNs, some affected users were able to get back online during the outage.

According to reports, a number of public sector and commercial organizations were affected. The New Zealand Police Media Team also reported an email outage, which was resolved as Microsoft dealt with its infrastructure issues.

The incident is the latest in a set of mishaps that will cause many to question the charge to the cloud of recent years. One poster in a Reddit forum echoed the thoughts of many administrators: "I am reconsidering the wisdom of transferring all my data to the cloud." Another took a more pragmatic approach: "I honestly think I could spend the rest of my career doing migrations, on prem->cloud->different cloud->on prem->cloud->...->retire!"

We contacted Microsoft to find out what happened this time, but the company has yet to provide an explanation. ®

Updated to add at 1500 UTC, August 1:

A Microsoft spokesperson told us that "This has been resolved" and directed us to the social media emission referenced above. So we're none the wiser with regard to what happened and how it was fixed.