*

Azure outage affected global industries, including

airlines and

airports

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Microsoft ( MSFT ) 365 services impacted by Azure configuration

change

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Outage follows recent Amazon AWS disruption, highlighting

tech

vulnerabilities

(Recasts paragraph 1 and adds Microsoft's ( MSFT ) statement in

paragraphs 2 and 7)

Oct 29 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) said late on

Wednesday it had resolved an outage of its Azure cloud platform

that had impacted the tech giant's suite of productivity

software, and a range of industries worldwide.

"While error rates and latency are back to pre-incident

levels, a small number of customers may still be seeing issues,

and we are still working to mitigate this long tail," Microsoft

Azure said, adding that the incident lasted for over 8 hours.

Alaska Airlines earlier in the day said it

experienced a disruption to key systems, including its website,

due to the Azure outage and was bringing systems back online

once Microsoft ( MSFT ) resolved the issue.

The website of London's Heathrow Airport was back online

after issues had affected it earlier in the day. Vodafone ( VOD )

had also been impacted due to the outage.

Affected services include Azure Communication Services and

Media Services, among others.

The Microsoft ( MSFT ) outage follows last week's disruption at

Amazon AWS, which caused global turmoil among thousands

of websites and some of the most popular apps, such as Snapchat

and Reddit ( RDDT ).

Microsoft ( MSFT ) 365 had said that its services experienced a

downstream impact related to the Azure outage, before confirming

late in the day that the impact from the Azure configuration

change had been resolved.

Beginning at about 12  p.m. ET on Wednesday, Azure said its

customers and Microsoft ( MSFT ) services that leverage Azure Front Door,

a global cloud-based content and application delivery network,

had experienced issues resulting in timeouts and errors.

The number of users reporting issues with Azure had dropped

to 230, as of 6:49 p.m. ET, from a peak of over 18,000 earlier

in the day, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by

collating status reports from a number of sources.

The outage at Microsoft ( MSFT ) 365 had eased to 77 users reporting

issues, as of 10:44 p.m. ET, down from a peak of nearly 20,000,

Downdetector's website showed. Its numbers are based on

user-submitted reports, and the actual number of affected users

may vary.

The AWS outage was the largest internet disruption since

last year's CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) malfunction hobbled technology systems

in hospitals, banks, and airports, highlighting the

vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.