Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft are among some of the sites and services facing issues amid Microsoft’s global outage.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues at a number of websites globally on Wednesday.
Microsoft said that some Microsoft 365 users We may see delays With Outlook and some other services.
The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which powers large parts of the Internet, reported “Deterioration of some services“At 1600 GMT.
She said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the problem Massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. Last week.
Amazon says AWS is currently operating normally.
Other sites affected in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile operator O2 – while people in the US have reported issues accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
Microsoft said Microsoft 365 business customers may experience issues.
Some Microsoft web pages also directed users to error notifications that read “Ah, something went wrong with the previous request.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said it is “working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that impacts the availability of some services,” adding that it is sharing updates on the Azure Status page.
It said it had found parts of its infrastructure with connectivity issues, and was working to “redirect affected traffic to restore service health.”
I started Topic on X With updates after some users reported that they were unable to access the service status page.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament has been suspended due to technical issues with Parliament’s online voting system.
A senior source in the Scottish Parliament told BBC News they believe the problems are linked to a Microsoft outage.
While the NatWest website has been affected, the bank’s mobile banking, online chat and telephone customer services remain available.
NatWest customers with a bookmark for online banking were able to access that service too, the bank said.
on its service status pageAzure network infrastructure was showing as “Critical” in every region of the world.
It’s not clear exactly how much the Internet will be affected, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at about 20% of the global cloud market.
The company said it believed the outage was the result of an “unintended configuration change.”
In other words, the system operating behind the scenes was changed, with unintended consequences.
Microsoft said it plans to fix the issue by effectively replacing its service with a recent backup that it knows is working properly.
But she could not provide an estimate of how long that would take.
Dr Saqib Kakfi, of Royal Holloway University, said the concentration of cloud services at Microsoft, Amazon and Google meant that an outage like this “could cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems”.
“Given the cost of hosting web content, economic forces are consolidating resources into a few very large players, but effectively putting all of our eggs in one of three baskets.”