Microsoft said its cloud services were recovering from an outage that disrupted its workplace software products and the operations of several companies.

The outage hit a service called Azure Front Door, which acts as an entry point for web applications built on the company’s servers, beginning at about 4pm on Wednesday Irish time, the company said. The product includes tools that route internet traffic to nearby data centres for faster access.

At one point on Wednesday afternoon, Microsoft’s Azure cloud status page reported network issues across all of its data centre regions worldwide.

The error cascaded to more than a dozen other Azure services, including employee authentication services, cybersecurity tools and databases. Microsoft rolled back the change that caused the error, and said in an update that it anticipated restoring all of its services by 11.20pm.

The outage prevented people from checking in for Alaska Airlines flights, halted votes set to be held inside the Scottish parliament and knocked out features of Microsoft’s Copilot-branded artificial intelligence service. Other major sites, such as those of Starbucks, were down on Wednesday, although those companies didn’t publicly identify the source of the issue.

Air New Zealand flights were delayed as online check-in and other services were affected, the airline said. Some international flights departing Auckland were delayed by more than one hour, according to the airport website.

Microsoft, which reported financial results hours after the outage began, declined to comment beyond its public status updates.

Last week Amazon’s cloud division suffered one of the worst outages in its history, taking down its most important cluster of data centres and disrupting the operations of hundreds of companies and consumer apps. The event dragged on for about 15 hours before the company managed to get all of its services back online. - Bloomberg