Breaking Microsoft's cloud services are having a bad day as users worldwide have reported difficulty connecting to Azure.

According to the company's social media orifice for all things Microsoft365-related, "We're currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features."

A glance at the Azure status dashboard indicates that all things Network Infrastructure-related are having issues on a global scale. The company's last message on the matter stated, "We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally. Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services. We have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue. More details will be provided as soon as possible."

In an unfortunate turn of events, no sooner had Microsoft's Azure Support mouthpiece suggested to users that they test their app's resilience with the Azure Chaos Studio, it appears the company has kicked off its own chaos testing in production.

One UK-based Register reader noted glumly that the outage "has broken most of our access to stuff."

"Can't access the portal which has stalled our development right now. I think prod is down also."

Another reader got in touch to tell us: "Initially access to the Portal wasn't possible. The attempted connection timed out. After a while, the message on the status page changed, and then I was able to connect to the portal, but only a very limited subset of my resources were visible.

"Basically, I could see Resource Groups, but none of the VMs, database servers etc. Those machines seem all to be up and working properly, but the portal isn't showing that they even exist."

It seems like a perfect excuse for a sunny afternoon in the pub - unless, of course, you actually need to get some work done while Azure staggers back to its feet.

The Register contacted Microsoft to learn more about its latest outage, but the company has not responded.

The outage will doubtless trigger a cold sweat in admins after the events less than two weeks ago, in which an Azure wobble preceded the arrival of CrowdStrike's horseman of the borkpocalypse.

Reader Sam C said: "It looks like their Front Door CDN service is unavailable, for about the last 1.5 hours.. causing us all sorts of fun.. websites down, portals down (including service status portals!)"

He quipped: "As someone asked on Twitter, 'Have they just installed Crowdstrike'!"

Despite the experience of many of our readers (and so many others on various social media platforms), Microsoft's status pages continue to insist that all is well other than that pesky Network Infrastructure. Then again, if you can't access the Azure Portal, which appears to be the experience of many users, you'll likely struggle with other parts of the service.

Microsoft's earnings call is scheduled for today, July 30. Apparently Azure will be a focus. Hopefully, the company will manage to shoehorn how it intends to stop Azure from falling over in between all the AI-powered bragging. ®

Updated to add at 1445 UTC

Microsoft said it had implemented networking configuration changes and "have performed failovers to alternate networking paths to provide relief. Monitoring telemetry shows improvement in service availability, and we are continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery."

There are still red hazard signs across the board.

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/30/microsofts_azure_portal_outage/