After a global outage in the case of Office 365, Minecraft, and key airline systems, Microsoft brings back the services across the Azure cloud.

Microsoft has deployed a solution to address one of the largest Azure cloud outages that quietly downed a number of their services, such as Office 365, Minecraft, and Xbox Live. The company has affirmed that the problem was caused by a change of configuration in its Azure infrastructure that brought users a worldwide plunge.

The Azure status page by Microsoft shows that the outage also affected the Azure front door, which is an important global content and application delivery system. Millions of users complained of issues connecting across broadly Downdetector, and not just Microsoft services but third-party systems as well, such as Costco, Starbucks, and airlines.

Both Air New Zealand and Alaska Airlines were in the news for reports of operational failures, such as failures in payment and digital check-ins, with the police and parliament websites in New Zealand going offline temporarily.

The time of the attack was also an important one since it happened only a few hours ahead of the quarterly earnings announcement at Microsoft. Even though it was disrupted, the company was fast in releasing a fix and returning services back to normal.

What the incident highlights is the increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure and the propagation of downtimes in the service providers of any size. Microsoft is the second largest cloud provider in the world after Amazon but ahead of Google in major markets across the globe.