Microsoft Azure faces outage, Starbucks, Minecraft among those affected | Top points

The Azure outage hit several websites and services, including Alaska Airlines, Vodafone in the UK and London's Heathrow Airport.

Microsoft on Tuesday suffered outages in its Azure cloud service, affecting a range of products and operations worldwide.

FILE PHOTO: A Microsoft logo is seen on an office building in New York City in this July 28, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo (REUTERS)

The Microsoft outage also led to service disruptions in Alaska Airlines and Heathrow Airport. Microsoft 365 said its services were experiencing a downstream impact related to the Azure outage.

The disruptions come days after hours-long disruption at Amazon AWS, which led to global turmoil affecting thousands of sites and popular apps, including Snapchat and Reddit. While AWS leads the cloud computing market, Microsoft's Azure comes next, followed by Google Cloud.

Here is all you need to know about the Microsoft outage:

⦁ Azure, on its status page, said that starting around 16:00 UTC (9:30 pm IST), customers may have experienced problems accessing the Azure management portal and that it has taken action to mitigate the issue.

⦁ The outage hit several websites and services, including Alaska Airlines, Vodafone in the UK and London's Heathrow Airport.

⦁ Internet users were unable to access Microsoft 365, Minecraft, Outlook, and several other Microsoft services for hours. Other major sites, including Starbucks, Costco and Kroger were also down.

⦁ The outage hit a service, called Azure Front Door, which acts as an entry point for web applications built atop the company’s servers, Bloomberg reported.

⦁ Azure, on its status page, said that an inadvertent configuration change led to the issue. "We have initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration. This is expected to be fully deployed in about 30 minutes from which point customers will start to see initial signs of recovery," it said.