Microsoft Hit With Another Outage As Azure Portal Goes Down
While the availability appears to have been restored, it was the latest in a series of outages affecting Microsoft cloud services this week.
In what appears to be the third major Microsoft service outage this week, the company confirmed that the portal for its Azure cloud platform was down as of Friday morning.
On its Azure status page, Microsoft said Friday that it’s aware of users receiving “errors accessing the Azure Portal” and that the company has been “applying mitigation” to address the issue. The problems appear to have been resolved as of this posting.
[Related: Microsoft Grapples With ‘Recurrence’ Of Microsoft 365 Service Issues]
The Azure portal outage follows availability issues that impacted OneDrive on Thursday and that took down several Microsoft 365 services — including Teams and SharePoint Online — on Monday and Tuesday of this week.
Shortly after 11 a.m. EDT Friday, user reports of Azure availability issues began to climb on Downdetector, a website that tracks outages. The site logged thousands of user reports of Azure outages over the next two hours.
Microsoft indicated on its Azure status page that as of 11 a.m. EDT Friday, “Azure customers may experience error notifications when trying to access the Azure Portal.”
“We have determined a potential root cause and are actively engaged in different workstreams applying load balancing processes in order to mitigate the issue,” the Redmond, Wash.-based company said on the page at 12:30 p.m. EDT.
As of about 1:45 p.m. EDT Friday, Microsoft said that its monitoring showed that the status of the Azure portal is “healthy.”
According to a BleepingComputer report Friday, a hacktivist group known as “Anonymous Sudan” — which had claimed responsibility for the OneDrive outage on Thursday — has claimed on Telegram that it has been carrying out DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against the Azure portal.
CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
On Thursday, Microsoft told CRN in a statement that it was “aware of these claims” — referring to the hacktivist group’s claim of responsibility for the OneDrive outage — and was investigating.
Microsoft said it restored OneDrive availability on Thursday several hours after the outage began.
On Monday, Microsoft had said that services including Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were affected by service issues. The following day, the company said it was experiencing a “recurrence of the issue and a drop in service availability.”