Copyright manchestereveningnews
Millions of people have been left without access to the internet and are facing issues with major websites including Natwest , BT and Minecraft due to a Microsoft outage. Downdetector - a website which tracks complaints about online services - showed a spike in reports of issues on Wednesday evening, including more than 2,000 reports at Xbox and at least 500 reports for Microsoft Outlook by 6pm. Heathrow Airport has also reportedly been affected. It is the second major cloud server outage in less than two weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down for several hours on 20 October, affecting a number of websites and apps. The service disruption caused issues on the HM Revenue & Customs website and left thousands of Lloyds and Halifax customers without access to their account. Microsoft Azure, the technology giant’s cloud platform, said it has discovered the cause of the issue affecting some of its services and was in the process of recovering service. As reported by the Mirror , Microsoft said users may not be able to access its admin centre and might see delays when using other 365 services, but added that it expects its services to be recovered by 11.20pm. Because so many sites and services use Microsoft’s cloud service, an outage like this one can have widespread impact. In a statement at 7.22pm, the firm said: "We initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration, which has now successfully been completed. "Customers may have begun to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes, and as we make progress in this workstream, customers will continue to see improvement. "Customer configuration changes will remain temporarily blocked while we continue mitigation efforts." They added: "We will notify customers once this block has been lifted." Many people, including gamers and travellers, have taken to X to complain about the disruption. Voting was suspended at the Scottish Parliament following the outage. Holyrood’s Presiding Officer said technical issues meant MSPs were unable to vote. Dr Saqib Kakvi, from the department of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London , said: "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." Dr Kakvi added: "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."
