Microsoft Azure is suffering a widespread outage; Xbox Live is partially down [Update: It’s back!]

It’s not just you: Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is experiencing a widespread outage across multiple regions. The company’s support page indicates that there’s an issue across the storage layer in many regions.

The issue appears to affect customers with virtual machines in all regions other than the new Australian data center.

The Azure status page says: “Starting at 19 Nov 2014 00:52 UTC we are experiencing a connectivity issue to Azure Services including Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes.”

Users on Twitter are expressing their outrage, particularly at the fact that the status page wasn’t updated for “at least thirty minutes” after the outage began.

https://twitter.com/Vlogx3/status/534887562922319872

Many of Microsoft’s own sites are affected, including the company’s press center, the Windows Store and Xbox Live is also experiencing some issues, with a large amount of users reporting they are unable to sign in or open the friends app.

The Xbox Live support page says that “social and gaming are limited” and that a number of functions including matchmaking, party and chat are currently unavailable.

We’ve contacted Microsoft’s press team for comment and will update when we hear back.

Update: Jeff Fritz, program manager for ASP.Net said that service should be restored shortly. The Azure status page has been updated stating that a fix is rolling out now.

A fix has been applied to Azure in the last 5 minutes.. you should start to see services come back online: http://t.co/IM3cMHWGeG

— Jeff Fritz (@csharpfritz) November 19, 2014

Update 2: Microsoft posted details about the cause of the outage in a blog post. The problem, as it turns out, was related to an Azure Storage performance update that hadn’t thrown up errors in pre-release testing.