Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 services affected by Central US Azure outage resulting from bad configuration change

Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 services were affected by a Central US Azure outage that occurred on July 18, 2024. A configuration change in Azure resulted in storage clusters and servers being disconnected, initiating an automatic reboot that took down affected services, which included Teams, OneDrive, and Defender. At this time, only Teams remains affected. Readers can track the status of this incident (Tracking Id: 1K80-N_8) on the status pages linked below. This is unrelated to the global CrowdStrike outage incident.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud service provider of both storage space and computing power. Businesses can save money on IT by using Azure for their servers rather than in-house servers because Microsoft is in charge of maintaining, upgrading, and backing up the cloud servers. However, errors caused by Microsoft Azure staff can affect both Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft says, "We determined that a backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the Central US region. This resulted in the compute resources automatically restarting when connectivity was lost to virtual disks hosted on impacted storage resources."

This basically means the servers could not access the data, so the cloud computers automatically rebooted, taking down many Microsoft services.

Affected services included Microsoft Azure, Defender, Fabric, Intune, OneDrive for Business, PowerBI, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Viva Engage. Only Microsoft Teams remains affected by the now-resolved Central US Azure outage, and Teams users should know that "Meeting organizers are unable to add people in the meeting scheduling form using Microsoft Teams for personal use apps."

Enterprise IT readers who are worried about future Azure outages taking down their companies for days can look into Kubernetes-based app platforms like VMWare Tanzu and read about it (in this book on Amazon) to learn how to deploy apps across multiple cloud services for redundancy.