Issues first appeared on Azure's updates page yesterday evening with an outage in the Azure US Central region around 10pm UTC, though it is not 100% clear this is the same problem as we are currently seeing since it was later reported that those Azure problems were fixed by 6:30am UK time today.
That a 'protective measure gone wrong' has brought such instant chaos to so many countries and industry sectors might surprise many people, but the reality is that public cloud infrastructure is both highly complex and surprisingly fragile.
However, rather than a massive hacking event, the reason for the outage is merely IT administrative and patching problems - which, in fact, account for the majority of Microsoft Azure and M365 outages, though rarely with such a widespread effect.
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