Microsoft Azure, the world's No. 2 cloud platform (remote computing), which suffered a global outage on Wednesday affecting certain online services for video games, businesses or transportation companies, has now been restored, according to its service website.
As of 16:00 GMT, “Microsoft customers and services using Azure Front Door (AFD) may experience issues resulting in delays, timeouts, and errors,” the Azure dashboard states.
According to Microsoft, “an unintentional configuration change caused this issue.” Full recovery occurred around 10 p.m. Time in Montreal.
Dutch train company NS announced that its online ticket sales were affected by a Microsoft outage, RTL in the Netherlands reported.
In the US, due to the incident at Microsoft, booking and printing of boarding passes for the American company Alaska Airlines were also disrupted, according to company messages published on X in response to user complaints.
Downdetector, a site where internet users report connection problems, has identified several thousand outages for online players of Minecraft or Xbox, Microsoft's video game platform.
This limited incident at Microsoft comes a week after a large-scale global outage at its Amazon subsidiary AWS.
The latter accounts for almost a third of the global market in the sector, ahead of its US rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which share the second third, according to firm Synergy Research Group.
The cloud, a global network of servers, databases and connected software, has become the backbone of global IT on which so much of the economy and everyday services are based.
The sector is on the rise as it faces demands for computing power in the race for artificial intelligence and increased use of generative artificial intelligence. To the point of being unable to meet demand.
“Demand continues to far exceed our available capacity,” Amy Hood, Microsoft's chief financial officer, acknowledged Wednesday as she presented analysts with the Redmond, Washington, IT giant's quarterly results.
“For several quarters now we have been running out of capacity, I thought that we would make up for it, but this is not the case, demand is growing,” she added.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, “Azure gained market share in the last quarter.”
