Imran Rahman-JonesTechnology reporter
Getty ImagesHeathrow, NatWest and Minecraft are among the sites and services experiencing problems due to the global Microsoft outage.
On Wednesday, crash tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of problems on a number of websites around the world.
Microsoft said that some Microsoft 365 usersincluding Outlook and Teams, there may be delays.
The Azure cloud computing platform, which powers much of the Internet, said:degradation of some services“At 16:00 GMT.
It said it was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause Huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.
Amazon reports that AWS is currently operating normally.
Other affected sites in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile operator O2, while in the US people are reporting problems accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
Microsoft said Microsoft 365 business customers may experience problems.
The company said it has identified parts of its infrastructure with connectivity issues and is working to “reroute affected traffic to restore service functionality.”
It started thread on X with updates after some users reported being unable to access the service status page.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament was suspended due to technical problems with Parliament's online voting system.
A senior source in the Scottish Parliament told BBC News they believed the problems were related to a Microsoft glitch.
Microsoft has been contacted for comment.
Azure's critical role on the Internet
On the service status pageAzure network infrastructure was considered “critical” in all regions of the world.
It's unclear exactly how much of the Internet is affected, but Microsoft Azure is estimated to have about 20% of the global cloud market.
The company said it believed the outage was the result of an “unintentional configuration change.”
In other words, the behind-the-scenes system was changed with unintended consequences.
Microsoft said it plans to fix the problem by effectively replacing its service with the latest backup it knows is working correctly.
But he was unable to give an estimate of how long it would take.
The concentration of cloud services at Microsoft, Amazon and Google means such failures “could bring down hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to the cost of hosting web content, economic forces are driving resource consolidation among a few very large players, but we're actually putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”
