Internet outages at NatWest, BT and Minecraft reported amid Microsoft disruption

Disruption affecting Microsoft has led to a spike in reported outages at a wide range of internet services including NatWest, Minecraft and BT.

Downdetector, a website which tracks complaints about online services, showed a spike in reports on Wednesday evening, including more than 2,000 reports at Xbox and at least 500 reports for Microsoft Outlook by 6pm.

Heathrow has also reportedly been affected.

Microsoft Azure, the technology giant’s cloud platform, said it has discovered the cause of the issue affecting some of its services and was in the process of recovering service.

Microsoft said users may not be able to access its admin centre and might see delays when using other 365 services, but added that it expects its services to be recovered by 11.20pm.

Because so many sites and services use Microsoft’s cloud service, an outage like this one can have widespread impact.

In a statement at 7.22pm, the firm said: “We initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration, which has now successfully been completed.

“Customers may have begun to see initial signs of recovery.

“We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes, and as we make progress in this workstream, customers will continue to see improvement.

“Customer configuration changes will remain temporarily blocked while we continue mitigation efforts.

“We will notify customers once this block has been lifted.”

Voting was suspended at the Scottish Parliament following the outage.

Holyrood’s Presiding Officer said technical issues meant MSPs were unable to vote.

It comes just nine days after an issue affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused issues on the HM Revenue & Customs website and outage reports at UK banks including Lloyds and Halifax, among many others.

Dr Saqib Kakvi, from the department of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “At approximately 16.00 UTC, Microsoft Azure reported DNS (domain name system) issues that led to the degradation of some services and stated customers may have issues accessing their Azure portals.

“There was an advisory at 17.10 UTC to not use Azure Front Door directly through the web portal but using lower-level tools such as PowerShell or Command Line Interfaces. This reinforces the issue being DNS which is how websites and webservices are found.

“This is very similar to the AWS outage of last week, which was also a DNS issue.

“Currently Amazon, Microsoft and Google have an effective triopoly on cloud services and storage, meaning that an outage of even part of their infrastructure can cripple hundreds, if not thousands, of applications and systems.

“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”