Microsoft Apologizes to Users for Widespread Outage Disrupting Xbox, Outlook, and Minecraft

Less than two weeks since a broken CrowdStrike update sucker punched millions of Windows 11 PCs across the world, Windows services are facing another wave of outages. This time, the issue is with Windows services. The ongoing outage impacted cloud-based services spanning Microsoft-owned products, including 365 services like Outlook email, Xbox Live, and Minecraft. 

Downdetector shows that Minecraft players’ outage reports peaked around 9:30 a.m. ET, but they continued into the middle of the day. Similar reports regarding Xbox Live show there’s some amount of service disruption. Meanwhile, users’ outage reports for Microsoft 365 seem to have tapered off since this morning. Microsoft confirmed in a Twitter post at around noon ET that there were some ongoing issues with the company’s cloud services. 

Microsoft confirmed issues regarding the tech giant’s Azure cloud services starting around 7:45 a.m. ET. On its Azure status page, Microsoft said the current outage is due to “an unexpected usage spike” leading to latency and outages. Services were improving from about 10 a.m. ET onwards, but in a Twitter post just before noon ET, Microsoft said there was “no ETA” for when everything would be fixed.

A Microsoft spokesperson responded to Gizmodo’s questions about the outage, saying “We are investigating reports of issues connecting to our services. More details will be provided as they become available on the Azure status page.”

It’s only been 11 days since the great CrowdStrike outage that took down an estimated 8.5 million PCs worldwide. On Saturday, Microsoft’s VP of OS security, David Weston, said that number was an undercount since there were likely more PCs that didn’t relay crash reports to Microsoft. The worldwide blue screen of death deluge was due to an error in a software update deployed by IT security giant CrowdStrike. 

For its part, CrowdStrike blamed an issue with its patch-testing software for the colossal Windows 11 failure. The outage impacted airlines and airports worldwide, grounding planes and causing travel chaos for days after. The company tried to mollify impacted customers with some faulty gift cards. On Monday, CNBC reported that Delta may be looking to sue CrowdStrike for anywhere from $350 to $500 million. 

Last week, Microsoft’s VP for Windows services and delivery, John Cable, wrote in a blog post that “mission critical resiliency” was needed from every large entity on the Microsoft platform. He also called for Windows to change its resilience strategies to avoid more outages on the world’s most-used OS. Part of this would be looking for “ways to move away from on-premises solutions to cloud management solutions.”

The bigger issue is that so many machines currently depend on the same services. So once they experience an issue, we see widespread outages that impact millions of people simultaneously. Crowdstrike was unique because it was just one update that caused mass failure across various industries, including those that really shouldn’t fail, such as healthcare and emergency services. When tech companies monopolize to the extent they do, these interruptions will impact more and more of our interconnected world.