Bulletins

Networking issue causes widespread Microsoft outage

"It's always DNS."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

It could take several hours for everything to return to normal.

Image: Microsoft

There's a running joke in enterprise tech that when a huge group of websites belonging to a company goes down, "it's always DNS" to blame. That was indeed the case for Microsoft on Thursday afternoon, when a widespread outage taking down multiple cloud services kicked even the company's status pages for those services offline.

After about an hour, Microsoft said it "rerouted traffic to our resilient DNS capabilities and are seeing improvement in service availability." Some services were starting to come back when it issued that update, but it could take several hours for everything to return to normal.

Tom Krazit

Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is Protocol's enterprise editor, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.

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Bulletins