Liputan6.com, Jakarta Recently, Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure, experienced a global outage.
Even so, the company officially said Wednesday evening it had resolved an outage of its Azure cloud platform that had affected the tech giant's productivity software suite, and various industries worldwide.
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"While error rates and latency are back to pre-incident levels, a small number of customers may still be seeing issues, and we are still working to mitigate this long tail," Microsoft Azure said, adding that the incident lasted for over 8 hours.
Alaska Airlines previously stated it was experiencing disruption to key systems, including its website, due to an Azure outage and would restore the system once Microsoft resolved the issue.
London Heathrow Airport's website has since returned online after experiencing issues earlier in the day.
Vodafone was also affected by the outage.
How the Outage Happened
Microsoft 365 had said that its services were experiencing downstream impacts related to the Azure outage, before later confirming that the impact of the Azure configuration change had been resolved.
Beginning around 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Azure stated that Microsoft customers and services utilizing Azure Front Door, a global cloud-based content and application delivery network, were experiencing issues resulting in timeouts and errors.
The number of users reporting issues with Azure had dropped to 230 as of 6:49 p.m. ET, from a peak of more than 18,000 the previous day, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from a number of sources.
The outage in Microsoft 365 had decreased to 77 users reporting issues as of 10:44 p.m. ET, down from a peak of nearly 20,000, according to the Downdetector website.
What's the Cause?
As reported by the BBC, this was caused by a "DNS issue"—the same root cause of last week's major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage.
Amazon stated that AWS was operating normally.
Other sites affected in the UK included supermarket chain Asda, M&S, and mobile operator O2—while in the US, people reported problems accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
Azure Crucial Roles
Microsoft Azure is said to have around 20% of the global cloud market share.
The company stated that it believes the outage was caused by an "inconsistent configuration change."
In other words, the underlying system was altered, with unintended consequences.
The concentration of cloud services among Microsoft, Amazon, and Google means that an outage like this "could bring down hundreds, even thousands of applications and systems," said Dr. Saqib Kakvi of Royal Holloway University.
The recent outages have exposed the fragility of today's internet, according to Cornell University engineering professor Gregory Falco.
"When we think of Azure or AWS, we think of a monolithic piece of technology infrastructure but the reality is that it's thousands if not tens of thousands of little pieces of a puzzle that are all interwoven together," said Mr Falco.