If you’re having trouble getting into Minecraft, Helldivers 2 or Sea Of Thieves right now, it might have something to do with a Microsoft outage that has taken services such as Azure offline. All three of the aforesaid games are experiencing spikes on DownDetector.com, and there are reports of disconnections and failed logins on social media. The outage has also affected various possibly more consequential non-gaming things, such as airline bookings and banks. On the upside, it seems to have taken down Microsoft Outlook.
Microsoft appear to have identified what’s broken. “We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue,” notes an update, shared by Techradar, who have set up a very excited liveblog full of words I don’t understand. “We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.
“We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to mitigate the portal access issues,” the note from MS continues, filling my head with fractal visions of doors peeling away from doors. “Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly. We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update.”
That message was from about 45 minutes before this post was published. If you can’t access your Minecraft server now, I believe it’s company policy that you are allowed to sneeze on Satya Nadella’s lunch. It seems likely other online videogames are struggling besides those mentioned above. Let us know if you’re having difficulty entering your preferred corner of cyberspace. Let us fill the comments thread with woe.
