MICROSOFT has been hit by a second outage affecting a number of services less than two weeks after a major IT meltdown caused chaos across the world.
Thousands of reports have flooded in to outage site DownDetector reporting issues with several Microsoft services, as well as the popular game Minecraft.
There are “network infrastructure” warnings for a “subset of Microsoft services” globally on the Microsoft Azure server status site.
Many Microsoft users have reported issues with connecting to the Microsoft 365 admin centre and opening the Service Health Status page which is supposed to help user during outages.
Affected users are reportedly experiencing issues with other Microsoft services like Outlook, Entra and Power Apps.
The disruption also appears to be affecting airports, such as Heathrow, the UK’s largest travel hub.
In a statement on X (formerly Twitter), Heathrow Airport said there was a “Microsoft issue impacting people globally” and that it was “unsure when there will be a fix”.
Microsoft said it has “multiple engineering teams” investigating the issue.
In a statement the Azure server status site, the company wrote: “We’ve identified multiple workstreams and are working to mitigate impacted workstreams by performing failover operations.
“More details will be provided as they become available.”
It comes a little over a week since Microsoft last made headlines for a worldwide mega-outage due to a faulty CrowdStrike update.
The outage affected hundreds of services on an unprecedented scale.
It grounded flights, disrupted emergency services, halted hospital appointments, newsrooms, television networks and businesses worldwide.
The so-called Microsoft meltdown, which lasted about 20 hours, is reported to have cost the economy an estimated $24billion – or £18billion.
One expert told The Sun it was the closest the world has ever come to the long-fabled “digital apocalypse”.
Microsoft users have taken to social media to complain about the second outage in a matter of weeks.
With crucial services affected, some people say they can’t do their jobs.
“Who at Microsoft’s bright idea was it to have so much be reliable on one system?,” one person wrote on X.
“That is really bad practice. I literally can’t do my job because it’s down again.”
Another added: “Microsoft and some sub systems are down again – will my work let us leave early? I reckon I’ll have more chance winning the lottery.”
While a third person wrote: “Could someone at @Microsoft feed the hamsters running the servers so some of us can get our work done?”
