The outage comes ahead of the company's Build conference for developers which is scheduled for next week and at which it normally announces new features in its products.
Microsoft used its Azure Support Twitter account to send this message a short time ago: "Engineers have identified the underlying root cause as DNS resolution issues affecting network connectivity with impact to Compute, Storage, AAD, and Database services.
"Mitigation steps are being applied, and we are starting to see signs of recovery."
⚠️ Engineers have identified the underlying root cause as DNS resolution issues affecting network connectivity with impact to Compute, Storage, AAD, and Database services. Mitigation steps are being applied, and we are starting to see signs of recovery. https://t.co/Dw19fIoS5H
— Azure Support (@AzureSupport) May 2, 2019
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Additionally, Azure and the Office support request systems were also down., he said.
Azure and Office support request systems are down. pic.twitter.com/JgCOinow0y
— Kevin Beaumont ??♀️ (@GossiTheDog) May 2, 2019
A veritable litany of complaints was broadcast on Twitter earlier as Azure users found the service had gone missing.
One said: "North Europe SQL down across the board too, Again no status update on Azure status, what a joke"
Another stated: "AWS, Level3, etc. is all down! The end of the world as we know it has begun!"
Office 365's https://t.co/60MCTIoyGQ portal showed no issues under Service health about 10 minutes ago. Now Service health itself is dead lol pic.twitter.com/uA4QQdSs8c
— bendodge (@bendodge) May 2, 2019
Microsoft's cloud services have experienced regular collapses over the last few months.
In January, Microsoft 365 services went on the blink, with affected users unable to authenticate to, and access, them. A week before that, Office 365 mail was down in Europe for more than a day.
And in November 2018, Microsoft had issues with the Office 365 service, with customers complaining they were unable to sign in to their accounts.
— LaundryChuteNinja (@LaundryChuteNin) May 2, 2019
A number of cloud services offered by the Redmond software giant use the MFA offered by Azure Active Directory to authenticate by default.
Two days before that, users of the company's Exchange Online service were unable to access their email for more than 12 hours.
And a week prior, Microsoft cloud customers using multi-factor authentication found themselves locked out of their accounts.
Additionally, a lightning strike near one of Microsoft's South Central US data centres in September 2018 led to a massive outage in regions around the globe.
The Azure service was hit by a fire suppression incident in 2017. It also suffered prolonged downtime in 2013.
Update: Microsoft tweeted around noon on Friday AEDT that the DNS issue had been resolved and said it would post details later.
Engineers have corrected the nameserver delegation issue and confirmed the issue is mitigated. A detailed RCA will be provided within approximately 72 hours at https://t.co/jESqAMYkJZ
— Azure Support (@AzureSupport) 3 May 2019
