July 30, 2024 Microsoft has issued an apology after thousands of users globally reported issues with its products, including email service Outlook and the popular game Minecraft. According to Downdetector, a site that tracks online outages, reports of problems surged on Tuesday afternoon.

The incident is particularly concerning as it comes less than two weeks after a major global IT outage caused by a flawed software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. That incident rendered over eight million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, significantly impacting sectors like healthcare and travel.

Microsoft announced that it had implemented a fix for the latest problem and noted that there were signs of improvement. However, the company admitted it had “no ETA” for a full resolution. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft stated, “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience. Our experts are currently investigating the situation in order to resolve it as soon as possible.”

This outage has hit just hours before Microsoft is scheduled to release its latest financial reports. The company indicated that the disruption affected its cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, which includes services such as Microsoft Office and Outlook.

Computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward commented on the situation, stating, “It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft. The culprit appears to be network infrastructure, but you would have hoped that with such important cloud-based systems there would not be a single point of failure.”