Huge internet outage as Microsoft, Xbox and Minecraft goes down for thousands

Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, appears to have suffered a serious outage which has resulted in Xbox and Minecraft servers going down for thousands of users.

Plenty of sites have seen a spike in issues reported on Downdetector due to the outage, with Microsoft confirming it was looking into the problem.

In a statement on the outage, Azure said: "We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal."

Earlier today (29 October), Microsoft 365 said it was looking into people having 'issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center', while the Xbox status page wasn't loading at all.

This comes a week after the AWS outage which knocked a whole heap of important websites offline for lots of people.

A number of sites are having big problems today (Downdetector)

That outage had been put down to a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), which is often referred to as the 'phone book of the internet'.

So when you type a website name into your browser the DNS directs you where you wanted to go.

In this case it appears to be something different and Microsoft has been keeping people updated on what's happening with the websites.

In a more recent update on the Microsoft Azure site, it posted: "Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. In addition. customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal.

"Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly.

Microsoft has acknowledged the problem (Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

"We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation.

"We are actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure. Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner."

So for now cross your fingers and hope that within the next hour some more good news is provided which announces this is all going to be cleared up.

Downdetector is fortunately showing a drop in some of the complaints people are having so efforts to quickly patch up the problem may be successful, though the scope of services affected has been wide.

Companies such as Starbucks and Costco were also showing problems with their systems, demonstrating how just a short hiccup in online services can have a catastrophic impact.