Is Microsoft down? Spike on DownDetector as users report problems with Outlook, Azure and 365

Issues with a 'widespread' Microsoft outage are being reported with customers reporting issues with Azure, 365 and Outlook.

Reports of problems have been flooding outage website, DownDetector since around 3.30pm with people complaining the Mircosoft.

People have taken to social media to see if there are any updates on when the issue is likely to be fixed. One person on Twitter wrote: "Azure is down, could this be a global outage?"

Another added how the outage may be affecting other applications including gaming. They wrote: "@XboxSupport it seems like there are a major Azure downtime, therefore Xbox (and certain Microsoft) services aren't available worldwide. XCloud is affected."

The outage was caused by a problem with Microsoft Azure - on its status page, Azure said: “Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors. We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue.”

It continued: “We have pushed our ‘last known good’ configuration, and customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes, and as we make progress in this workstream, customers will continue to see improvement.

“Customer configuration changes will remain temporarily blocked while we continue mitigation efforts. We will notify customers once this block has been lifted.

“Some customers may also have experienced issues accessing the Azure management portal. We have failed the portal away from AFD to mitigate these access issues. Customers should now be able to access the Azure portal directly, and while most portal extensions are functioning as expected, a small number of endpoints (e.g., Marketplace) may still experience intermittent loading problems.

“We are continuing to monitor progress closely and will provide an ETA for full mitigation within the next 20 minutes as we assess recovery across the AFD service.”