Microsoft Cloud services are down for some users

A number of users report that virtually all Microsoft services hosted on Azure went down on the evening of April 1. @AzureSupport and @ MSFT365Status The accounts on Twitter both acknowledge the problem and point many users to alternate status pages that don’t work at 5:45 p.m. ET.

Users report that the Azure portal, Azure services, Dynamics 365, Xbox Live, and a host of other services cannot be reached. Bing.com is down. Interestingly, my Exchange email is available at this point, but it might be because Microsoft hasn’t finished porting Exchange to Azure.

It is not known which countries and regions are affected at this time, as the alternative Azure status page suggested by Microsoft is showing green check marks – despite a header that says “An emerging issue is under investigation. We will provide an update. update with further details shortly. “(Thanks to Daniel Fajardo Valenti on Twitter for the screenshot of this other page.)

At 6 p.m. ET, the MSFT365Status account posted: ““We are investigating a potential DNS issue and are evaluating our mitigation options.”

Update: At 6:30 p.m. ET, the Azure status page was open (for me, anyway). This is a global blackout. Microsoft’s status message indicates that a “subset” of users may experience “intermittent problems” with Microsoft services.

Update (6:35 p.m. ET): The MSFT365Status account reports that things may be recovering: “Microsoft has rerouted traffic to our resilient DNS capabilities and is seeing improved service availability. We are continuing to investigate the cause of the DNS problem. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes or if events warrant.”

I’ve seen a few users say that today isn’t the first time this week that Microsoft’s cloud services have struggled. Microsoft Client Long Zheng noted, “This Azure DNS problem did not start today. I have seen random DNS resolution failures in App Services and Cloud Services over the past few days, which has clearly worsened. I am surprised that the Azure engineers don’t have any internal measurements. Who could have caught this sooner. “