Major internet outage shuts down Microsoft and Xbox for thousands

A major internet outage has just seen Microsoft and Xbox go dark for thousands of users.

According to Tech Radar, Microsoft users are reporting trouble logging into several services, including Minecraft, Outlook emails and Xbox.

The issue appears to be traced to Azure, the company's cloud computing platform, knocking out Microsoft's 365 services.

In an update, the tech giant said in a statement that it is working hard to resolve the issue.

"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services," it said.

"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. 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."

The company says Azure has gone down (Getty)

The major internet outage has sparked uproar on social media, with dozens reporting issues on the internet and even Starbucks and Amazon customers.

Users say they have been unable to connect to websites and apps, with the outage also having a knock-on effect to other platforms that rely on the networks Azure and AWS for connectivity, including the coffee franchise as well as Costco and Kroger.

A user on X, formerly Twitter, noted: "Azure is down and so is half the internet."

Meanwhile, others appear to joke about the situation that they can log off for work today.

"I guess work is done for the day," another wrote, though others said they celebrated too soon what with Microsoft Teams still appearing to be working.

"If you see me wearing my Azure shirt, it means I'm down for whatever," a third joked.

Microsoft has since claimed to have found the problem, dropping in a new statement: "We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state."

It continues: "We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to mitigate the portal access issues. Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly.

"We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update."