This follows Microsoft’s Tuesday favorable earnings reports, but it contrasts with the company’s announcement of a 5% personnel cut, which will result in 10,000 job losses. The Azure team, which is responsible for the company’s revenue growth and is a division of Microsoft, was among those laid off. It is interesting to note that while Azure is a growth driver for Microsoft, growth overall in the cloud services sector has slowed, indicating that the sector is reaching maturity.
The outage that occurred on Tuesday was caused by Azure, and Microsoft kept its tradition of disclosing the source of outages by posting an impact statement on its webpage for Azure status history. Azure resources in Public Azure regions were affected by the three-hour outage that occurred across several regions. PowerBI and M365, two well-known services, were also impacted.
According to Microsoft’s own statements regarding the matter, WAN issues were to blame for the outage. The company’s WAN update cut down connectivity between the internet and Microsoft’s main services.