Copyright standard
A “significant Microsoft outage” has shut down Heathrow Airport's website, suspended votes in the Scottish Parliament and caused chaos on Xbox and Minecraft. Heathrow Airport confirmed to the Standard that its website was down due to an issue with Microsoft, although the issue has not caused delays or cancellations to any flights at Europe’s busiest airport. Voting had to be suspended at the Scottish Parliament following the outage while there were thousands of issues also reported with Xbox, Minecraft and Azure - all owned by Microsoft. The Downdetector website has reported significant spikes in outages impacting the Royal Bank of Scotland, BT and Asda. The website, which tracks complaints about online services, showed a spike in reports on Wednesday evening, including more than 2,000 reports at Xbox and at least 500 reports for Microsoft Outlook by 6pm. On its X account, Microsoft Azure, the technology giant’s cloud platform, said it was investigating an issue affecting some of its services. Microsoft said users may not be able to access its admin centre and might see delays when using other 365 services. Because so many sites and services use Microsoft’s cloud service, an outage like this one can have widespread impact. In a statement at 6.11pm, the firm said: “We’ve halted the rollout of the impacting configuration change. “We’re continuing our efforts to route service traffic away from the affected infrastructure, where the change was already applied, to recover service availability as quickly as possible. “In parallel, we’re working to revert the impacted infrastructure to a previous healthy state.” Mobile phone operator O2 also faced issues while in the US people complained about problems accessing the website of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger, the BBC reported. Holyrood's Presiding Officer said technical issues meant Members of Scottish Parliament were unable to vote. Politicians at the Scottish Parliament were taking part in the second of two marathon sessions to vote on nearly 400 amendments to the Land Reform Bill. Politicians had only been debating changes to the legislation for around half an hour before issues began just before 4.30pm. Alison Johnstone, the Presiding Officer, said she would update the chamber at 7pm. She told MSPs: "There is, it appears I understand, a significant Microsoft outage affecting some products, and it is global, and that is preventing us from voting." She said the Parliamentary Bureau had met and agreed to suspend voting before updating Holyrood at 7pm "with a view to resuming business" then. Microsoft has said it is investigating the issue, which it warned could also impact Outlook and Teams. A spokesperson for the company said: “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. “Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page.” It comes just nine days after an issue affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused issues on the HM Revenue & Customs website and outage reports at UK banks including Lloyds and Halifax, among many others. Dr Saqib Kakvi, from the department of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “At approximately 16.00 UTC, Microsoft Azure reported DNS (domain name system) issues that led to the degradation of some services and stated customers may have issues accessing their Azure portals. “There was an advisory at 17.10 UTC to not use Azure Front Door directly through the web portal but using lower-level tools such as PowerShell or Command Line Interfaces. This reinforces the issue being DNS which is how websites and webservices are found. “This is very similar to the AWS outage of last week, which was also a DNS issue. “Currently Amazon, Microsoft and Google have an effective triopoly on cloud services and storage, meaning that an outage of even part of their infrastructure can cripple hundreds, if not thousands, of applications and systems. “Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.” The Standard has contacted Microsoft for further comment.
