British News Agency

According to the BBC, Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft are among the sites experiencing access problems following a global Microsoft outage.

Outage-tracking site Downdetector said that on Wednesday there were thousands of reports of access issues across many websites worldwide. Microsoft said users of Microsoft 365, including Outlook and Teams, might encounter delays.

Azure, the company’s cloud platform that underpins a large portion of the internet, reported “performance degradation” in some services at 16:00 GMT.

Microsoft said the issue stemmed from “DNS problems,” the same cause behind last week’s major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage.

A request for comment was sent to Microsoft.

Other UK sites affected include supermarket chain Asda and mobile operator O2, while in the US there were reports of access issues at Starbucks and retailer Kroger.

Microsoft’s service status page noted that enterprise Microsoft 365 customers could be affected.

The company said it had identified connectivity issues in parts of its infrastructure and was working to reroute impacted traffic to “restore service health.”

As some users were unable to access the service status page, Microsoft began posting updates on X.