Xbox and Minecraft are down due to major Azure outage - but Microsoft's hopeful for a quick fix

Microsoft is in for another rocky ride with a major outage, as Azure problem takes out Minecraft logins, Xbox and Microsoft 365 services.

Xbox and Minecraft are down due to major Azure outage - but Microsoft's hopeful for a quick fix
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Tech Reporter
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TL;DR: A major Microsoft Azure outage has disrupted Minecraft, leaving players unable to login, and hit Xbox as well as Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft is actively investigating these issues and says it's rerouting traffic to alternate infrastructure, aiming to resolve the downtime more promptly - keep those fingers crossed.

Microsoft's servers have hit trouble (again), as a major Azure outage has left Minecraft players frustrated, Xbox services down, and more besides.

Update (14:35 CDT):Microsoft has said that customers might now see the first signs of recovery. The company just posted on its Azure dashboard: "We initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration, which has now successfully been completed. Customers may have begun 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."

Microsoft 365 services are affected by the downtime as well as Minecraft, with the game showing a strong upsurge of reports on Down Detector in the last hour and a half (since approximately 10:30am CDT). Xbox servers and the official website have been hit, too.

As TechRadar reports, Microsoft initially posted on its Azure status dashboard to confirm the outage, stating:

"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues resulting in availability degradation of some services. Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly. We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner."

So, that sounds relatively positive, and it might be the case that the outages which are currently being experienced are fixed in fairly short order.

In an update on X from the Microsoft 365 Status account (see above), we're told that the company is rerouting traffic to "alternate healthy infrastructure as a near-term resolution", so mitigations might come into play faster than expected. Fingers crossed on that one, and certainly Microsoft could do without further bad publicity in terms of yet more downtime.

Microsoft also noted that the Microsoft 365 admin center is down, and users were told to visit the status.cloud.microsoft site for further updates on what's going on there - only to find that this portal is down, as well. Ouch, in a word.