Microsoft Azure's services recovering after global outage

Microsoft's Azure said it was seeing strong improvement in regions that were affected by an outage, impacting the tech giant's suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.

Alaska Airlines earlier on Wednesday said it experienced a disruption to key systems, including its website, due to the Azure outage and was bringing systems back online once Microsoft resolved the issue.

Britain's Heathrow Airport's website was back online after issues had affected it earlier in the day. Vodafone had also been impacted due to the outage.

Azure is seeing "strong signs of improvement across affected regions and are tracking toward full mitigation" by 7:20 p.m. ET, it said on its status page. Affected services include Azure Communication Services and Media Services, among others.

The Microsoft outage follows last week's disruption at Amazon AWS, which caused global turmoil among thousands of sites and some of the web's most popular apps, such as Snapchat and Reddit.

Microsoft 365 had said that its services were experiencing downstream impact related to the Azure outage. A recent configuration change to a portion of Azure infrastructure is causing the outage, it said on its status page.

Beginning at about 12  p.m. ET, Azure said its customers and Microsoft services that leverage Azure Front Door, a global cloud-based content and application delivery network, had experienced 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 over 18,000 earlier in the day, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.

The outage at Microsoft 365 had eased to 377 users reporting issues as of 6:49 p.m., down from nearly 11,700, Downdetector's website showed. Its numbers are based on user-submitted reports and the actual number of affected users may vary.

The AWS outage was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.

(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Alan Barona)