Websites for Heathrow, NatWest, and Minecraft came back online late on Wednesday after a major Microsoft outage caused widespread disruption. The problems lasted for several hours and affected thousands of users worldwide.
Thousands report global website failures
Outage tracker Downdetector received thousands of reports about website problems across multiple countries. Users complained of login issues, slow loading pages, and connection errors. The issue hit some of the most visited platforms globally.
Microsoft confirmed that users of Microsoft 365 faced delays in services such as Outlook. By 21:00 GMT, many affected websites were back online after Microsoft rolled back a previous update.
Azure cloud suffers global disruption
The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which supports large parts of the internet, reported “degradation of some services” at around 16:00 GMT. Microsoft blamed the disruption on “DNS issues,” the same cause behind Amazon Web Services’ major outage last week.
Amazon said its systems operated normally during the incident.
In the UK, websites of Asda, M&S, and O2 also went down temporarily. In the US, users reported difficulties accessing Starbucks and Kroger websites.
Businesses and users face widespread disruption
Microsoft confirmed that many of its business customers using Microsoft 365 services experienced problems. Some Microsoft web pages displayed an error message reading, “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”
The company used its official account on X to post service updates after users reported they could not access the service status page.
NatWest’s main website was briefly affected, but the bank’s mobile app, web chat, and telephone banking continued to work.
Consumers urged to document financial issues
The UK consumer organisation Which? reminded companies to keep customers informed and to compensate them where necessary. “Customers should keep evidence of any failed or delayed payments in case they need to make a claim,” said Which? consumer law expert Lisa Webb. She also advised anyone concerned about missed bills to contact the relevant company and ask for any fees to be waived.
Scottish Parliament halts debate over outage
The outage disrupted parliamentary business in Scotland, where technical problems with the online voting system forced a suspension of proceedings. A planned debate on land reform legislation was postponed. The bill aims to give the Scottish government powers to intervene in private sales and break up large estates.
A senior source in the Scottish Parliament said they believed the technical problems were linked to Microsoft’s global outage.
Azure’s power and the risks of concentration
Experts say the exact scale of the disruption remains unclear, but Microsoft Azure is estimated to control about 20% of the global cloud market. Microsoft said the failure resulted from “an inadvertent configuration change,” meaning a system setting was altered with unexpected consequences.
Dr Saqib Kakvi from Royal Holloway University warned that the dominance of a few cloud providers increases the risks of major disruptions. “When a large provider like Microsoft, Amazon, or Google experiences an outage, hundreds or even thousands of systems can be crippled,” he said. He explained that economic pressures drive consolidation into a few massive providers, creating a fragile digital ecosystem.
Experts highlight the fragility of the internet
Cornell University professor Gregory Falco said the incident showed how delicate modern online infrastructure has become. “Azure and AWS may seem like unified systems, but they are really thousands of interconnected components,” he explained. Some are managed by the providers themselves, while others depend on third parties such as CrowdStrike, which previously released a faulty update affecting over eight million Microsoft-based computers.
Falco said the complexity of these networks means even a small change can trigger widespread failures, underlining how vulnerable the internet remains despite its scale.
