A massive Microsoft cloud outage is wreaking havoc worldwide, and here’s what you need to know.
For those unfamiliar, Microsoft Azure is the tech giant’s cloud computing service, vital for companies worldwide to deploy and manage their digital operations. It’s crucial, considering it’s leveraged by a whopping 70 percent of organizations globally.
This widespread dependency is why the current outage has sent shockwaves around the world, wreaking havoc in sectors from aviation to healthcare. Numerous U.S. airlines, including major players like American and Delta, found themselves grounding flights and cancelling services.
Companies such as Frontier Airlines and SunCountry were also in turmoil, with Frontier alone cancelling 147 flights and delaying 212 others last Thursday, as per the New York Post.
Thankfully, operations are beginning to smooth over. Earlier today, Microsoft announced the restoration of their cloud services, signaling a return to normalcy, CNBC reports.
The trouble began at around 6pm ET yesterday, and while some areas in the U.S. are back online, others still face disruptions.
Microsoft’s Azure status page indicates ongoing investigations into the issue.
The company shared their insights into the cause: “We are aware of this issue and have engaged multiple teams,” a company statement read. “We’ve determined the underlying cause. A backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the Central US region.”
The statement continued, “This resulted in the compute resources automatically restarting when connectivity was lost to virtual disks. Mitigation has been confirmed for all Azure Storage clusters, the majority of services are now recovered.
“A small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact. Impacted customers will be continuing to communicate through the Azure service health portal.”
While the U.S. sees a turnaround, the ripple effects are still palpable in the UK and Australia, with both banks and airlines scrambling amid the service interruptions. Even local healthcare practices in England have been hit, causing disruptions in patient care.
According to PA, a major setback was reported in British healthcare: “All practices in the UK using the NHS commissioned GP computer system EMIS are currently without access to their IT systems.”
The impact stretched to the media as well, with Sky News temporarily knocked off air due to the ongoing technical difficulties.
Down in Australia, some retail stores have reverted to old-school cash transactions because the outage has knocked out digital payment systems.
Even further afield, reports from India and Japan confirm they’re feeling the effects too.