While the world slept, Microsoft Office suffered a major outage due to an unexpected surge in usage. The disruption brought the Azure network infrastructure to a standstill, affecting users globally. Microsoft confirmed that the problem originated from Azure Front Door (AFD), its cloud content delivery network (CDN), which struggled to handle the sudden surge in demand.

The disruption first came to light when Azure announced a global impact across multiple regions including the US, APAC, Europe, and the Middle East. “We are investigating reports of problems connecting to Microsoft services globally,” Microsoft said. “Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services. Multiple engineering teams are engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue.”

According to the report, on July 30, 2024 at 5:15 pm (IST) some Microsoft customers started having trouble connecting to their services. This happened because parts of Microsoft’s cloud system slowed down and stopped working due to an unexpected increase in usage.

To fix this, Microsoft made some changes to its network setup and redirected traffic to other parts of the system, which made things better by 7:40 pm (IST).

However, these quick fixes created some new issues for some services. Microsoft continued to work on these issues, especially in Asia Pacific and Europe. They also used a step-by-step approach to fix things in the US, aiming to get everything back to normal by 2:00 AM (IST).

The disruption also affected Microsoft 365 customers worldwide, leading to apologies on social media. “We’re sorry to hear you’re having issues with our services,” Microsoft’s social team wrote on Twitter. “Our experts are investigating the situation to resolve it as quickly as possible.”
Although Microsoft has not yet released an official incident report, it has acknowledged “accessibility issues and degraded performance” affecting multiple services. Users on Reddit reported that almost all Microsoft online features are either down or significantly impaired.

A few days ago, many Microsoft Windows 10 computers around the world were hit by a glitch that affected millions of people. People on social media posted pictures of their computer screens as their systems suffered a BSOD problem with the classic blue screen. The glitch apparently affected not only people working in many offices around the world, but services were also affected at important locations such as airports. It was reported that the glitch was possibly the result of an update released by CrowdStrike.