AWS, Microsoft 365 users face disruption in two separate outages
Global tech disruption continued with a raft of outage reports on Tuesday, seemingly unrelated to the CrowdStrike incident from 19 July.
Less than a fortnight after the widely publicised global outage triggered by a CrowdStrike update, the IT world has been roiled by further disruption. Both AWS and Microsoft users reported outages across various services this week.
Neither outage appears to be related to the CrowdStrike incident on 19 July. The vendor confirmed that the issues were issues by Microsoft 365 users globally.
Microsoft confirms user reports of disruption
At 1PM BST on Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed that there were ongoing "access issues and degraded performance" for a variety of services and features under its Microsoft 365 umbrella.
The Redmond, Washington-based cloud and AI tools vendor posted to X – formerly known as Twitter - that "we're currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features," according to the X post. "More information can be found under MO842351 in the admin center. The outage occurred just hours before Microsoft reports earnings for its fourth fiscal quarter.
At 3:51PM BST, Microsoft added: "We've applied mitigations and rerouted user requests to provide relief. We're monitoring the service to confirm resolution and further information can be found at https://status.cloud.microsoft or under MO842351 in the admin center." When a CRN reporter tried to access the cloud status website about 10 minutes after the X post, the reporter received a "site can't be reached" error message.
CRN US reached out to Microsoft for comment.
On a Microsoft Azure Status website, the vendor said that "starting approximately at 11:45 UTC on 30 July 2024, a subset of customers may have experienced issues connecting to Microsoft services globally."
"We have implemented networking configuration changes and have performed failovers to alternate networking paths to provide relief," according to the status page. Monitoring telemetry shows improvement in service availability from approximately 14:10 UTC onwards, and we are continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery.
A chart breaking down the issues warned that users of any region in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) could face network infrastructure issues.
Users in the "SysAdmin" Subreddit reported experiencing outages in Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Eastern U.S.
Some users found humour in the situation. "Why does Team's never go down for me? An afternoon free of calls or messages would be lovely," one user wrote, referring to Microsoft's popular communications and collaboration platform.
AWS outages round out a day of issues
Amazon Web Services was the second vendor to face a significant outage as Amazon-owned Whole Foods supermarkets closed self-checkout lanes, delivery drivers abandoned their routes and Alexa devices stopped working.
The AWS service health dashboard said as of 2AM BST today, that there was a "degradation" of multiple services and the cloud computing giant was working on "resolving the increased error rates and latencies for Kinesis APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. We wanted to provide you with more details on what is causing the issue. Starting at 3:12 PM PDT, a subsystem within Kinesis began to experience increased contention when processing incoming data. While this had limited impact for most customer workloads, it did cause some internal AWS services - including CloudWatch, ECS Fargate, and API Gateway to experience downstream impact."
AWS said its engineers "have identified the root cause of the issue affecting Kinesis and are working to address the contention. While we are making progress, we expect it to take 2 -3 hours to fully resolve."
In another update at 2:59 AM BST, AWS said it was continuing "to work toward recovery, though progress is occurring slower than originally anticipated. We are seeing some improvements internally, though they may not be visible externally."
Downdetector.com, which tracks outages on the internet, listed 348 reports of AWS outages as of 1AM. At time of writing, the number of reports is down to 42, mostly localised to the US.