Microsoft Azure is down, affecting 365, Xbox, Minecraft, and others

Microsoft Azure, the tech giant's cloud computing platform, is currently facing a major outage that began around noon ET on Wednesday. The company has confirmed the incident on its service status page, attributing the disruption to an accidental configuration change. This significant downtime has led to the unavailability of several key Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and Minecraft. Additionally, other websites, such as those for Costco and Starbucks, are also experiencing accessibility issues as a result of the outage. Compounding the situation, this outage occurs just hours ahead of Microsoft's earnings announcement scheduled for later today. This incident follows a similar outage experienced by Amazon AWS only a week prior, which also impacted a range of websites, financial institutions, and government services.