As the world slept, Microsoft Office faced a major outage due to an unexpected spike in usage.
The disruption brought down Azure network infrastructure, affecting users globally. Microsoft confirmed that the issue stemmed from Azure Front Door (AFD), its cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN), which struggled to handle the sudden surge in demand.
The outage first came to light when Azure announced a global impact across regions, including the Americas, APAC, Europe, and the Middle East. “We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally,” Microsoft stated. “Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services. Multiple engineering teams are engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue.”
As per reports, at 5:15 PM (IST) on July 30, 2024, some Microsoft customers started having trouble connecting to their services. This was because an unexpected surge in usage caused some parts of Microsoft’s cloud system to slow down and act up.
To fix this, Microsoft made some changes to their network setup and redirected the traffic to other parts of their system, which helped things get better by around 7:40 PM (IST).
However, these quick fixes caused some new problems for a few services. Microsoft kept working on these issues, especially in Asia Pacific and Europe. They also used a step-by-step approach to fix things in the Americas, aiming to have everything back to normal by 2:00 AM (IST).
The outage also affected Microsoft 365 customers worldwide, prompting apologies on social media. “We’re sorry to hear you’re running into issues with our services,” Microsoft’s social team wrote on Twitter. “Our experts are currently investigating the situation to resolve it as soon as possible.”
Although Microsoft has yet to release an official incident report, it acknowledged “access issues and degraded performance” affecting several services. Users on Reddit reported that nearly all Microsoft Online features were either down or significantly degraded.
A couple of days ago many Microsoft Windows 10 computers glitched across the world, leaving hundreds of thousands of people affected. On social media, people posted photos of their computer screens after their systems suffered BSOD with the classic blue screen on display.
The glitch apparently impacted not just people who were at work in many offices around the world but also in critical places like airports where services were affected. It was reported that the glitch was likely a result of an update issued by CrowdStrike.