London: Websites for Heathrow Airport, NatWest Bank, and Minecraft were restored late on October 29, after a major global Microsoft outage disrupted access to numerous websites across several countries.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, thousands of users reported problems accessing multiple websites for several hours. The disruptions were linked to Microsoft’s systems, particularly its Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins vast portions of the internet’s infrastructure.
Microsoft acknowledged that some users of Microsoft 365 experienced delays with Outlook and other services. By 21:00 GMT, however, many of the affected websites were once again accessible after the company rolled back a previous update, restoring functionality.
Business @scotparl has been postponed this evening due to an ongoing global IT outage that has affected our voting system.
— Scottish Parliament (@ScotParl) October 29, 2025
The company reported that Azure had experienced a ‘degradation of some services’ beginning around 16:00 GMT due to DNS issues, which were identified as the same root cause of last week’s large-scale Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. Amazon later confirmed that AWS was operating normally.
Banking, shopping and Parliament
In the United Kingdom, several prominent websites were affected, including supermarket chains Asda and Marks & Spencer (M&S), as well as mobile phone operator O2. In the United States, users reported similar issues accessing the websites of Starbucks and Kroger.
Microsoft’s own web pages were also impacted, with some users encountering error messages stating: “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.” Due to accessibility issues on its service status page, the tech giant turned to X to provide updates and communicate with users.
Although NatWest’s website was temporarily affected, its mobile banking app, web chat, and telephone customer service lines remained operational throughout the outage. In response, the UK consumer organization Which? urged companies to keep customers informed and offer compensation for any inconvenience caused by service disruptions.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Scottish Parliament was forced to suspend its proceedings due to technical issues affecting its online voting system, which officials believe were connected to the Microsoft outage. The disruption led to the postponement of a land reform debate, which could have allowed the Scottish government to intervene in private property sales and require large estates to be divided.
The full extent of the Microsoft outage remains unclear, but Microsoft’s Azure is estimated to control around 20 percent of the global cloud market, highlighting its central role in online operations. The company later attributed the incident to an ‘inadvertent configuration change,’ meaning that an internal system modification had unintended consequences affecting global connectivity.
Experts warned that such incidents expose the vulnerability of the modern internet, where much of the world’s online infrastructure is concentrated among a few major providers, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
The widespread Microsoft outage serves as another reminder of the fragility of the digital ecosystem, where even a minor technical misconfiguration in one of the world’s leading cloud platforms can temporarily paralyze online services across multiple industries and continents.
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