Gamers around the world were hit by widespread outages Tuesday as a major Microsoft Azure disruption took down parts of the Xbox network, Minecraft, and other Microsoft services.
Players reported being unable to sign in, play online games, or access Game Pass, while Xbox’s Live Core Services, Purchases and Content Usage, and Social and Gaming functions were all listed as down.
Microsoft confirmed the problem on its status pages, saying that Microsoft 365 services were also affected due to the ongoing Azure issue. The company directed users to follow the @AzureSupport account for updates.
Azure’s engineering team said they were investigating “issues impacting several Azure services,” including Azure Front Door, a key part of Microsoft’s global cloud network. The problem began around 16:00 UTC and caused timeouts, latency, and connection errors across multiple platforms.
According to Azure, an “inadvertent configuration change” triggered the outage. Engineers are now rolling back the system to a previous stable version while blocking all further configuration updates to prevent the problem from reoccurring.
The Minecraft website and server files were among the affected services, leaving players unable to connect to worlds or multiplayer servers. Microsoft said customers may still experience issues accessing parts of the Azure management portal, such as the Marketplace, as recovery continues.
No estimated time for full restoration has been provided, though Microsoft said it will issue updates every 30 minutes until the rollback is complete.
Even the Xbox Live status page isn’t working—that’s when you know it’s bad. Last week saw Amazon’s AWS go down, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn with its similar Azure service. The latest refresh of the Azure status page shows some services are slowly coming back online.
Other affected services include companies and websites that rely on Azure, which includes Starbucks. The Starbucks Canada app is not working right now. An error message in the Starbucks Canada iPhone app says, “We’re cleaning up a big spill. While we tidy up an expert barista can take your order in the store. Thanks for your patience.”
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