As the world experiences the second major cloud disruption in the space of a week, many are calling for an increased focus on digital sovereignty.
Yesterday (29 October), Microsoft experienced a major global outage to some of its services that disrupted the websites, apps and services of numerous well-known companies.
The outage, which Microsoft said lasted from 3.45pm to just after midnight, primarily affected the Microsoft Azure cloud computing and Microsoft 365 services, which in turn disrupted the sites and services of Microsoft-owned brands such as Xbox and Minecraft.
The outage also affected a multitude of companies and organisations that use the tech giant’s products including Starbucks, Capital One, Vodafone, Heathrow Airport and Alaska Airlines. The outage even disrupted government processes, with a planned vote regarding legislation amendments in the Scottish Parliament being suspended as a result.
Microsoft, in an update on the Azure status page, linked the outage to Azure Front Door – a cloud content delivery network service – stating that an “inadvertent tenant configuration change” triggered a widespread service disruption.
“The change introduced an invalid or inconsistent configuration state that caused a significant number of AFD nodes to fail to load properly, leading to increased latencies, timeouts and connection errors for downstream services,” said Microsoft in the update.
“The trigger was traced to a faulty tenant configuration deployment process. Our protection mechanisms, to validate and block any erroneous deployments, failed due to a software defect which allowed the deployment to bypass safety validations.
“Safeguards have since been reviewed and additional validation and rollback controls have been immediately implemented to prevent similar issues in the future.”
The affected services listed by Microsoft included App Service, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Microsoft Copilot for Security and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, just to name a few.
Going forward, Microsoft said it will be completing an “internal retrospective” to understand the incident in more detail. The tech giant plans to share the findings of this investigation within 14 days.
High revenue, high concerns
The outage occurred just as Microsoft released its latest earnings figures, where the tech giant reported that its first fiscal quarter total revenue increased 18pc to $77.7bn, beating analysts’ expectations of $75.5bn according to Bloomberg estimates, as well as a 39pc revenue gain for its Azure cloud-computing unit.
But while Microsoft projected a strong financial outlook, the fallout of the Azure outage – combined with the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage – has seen many voicing concerns about the overreliance that comes with centralised cloud providers and cloud monopolies.
“The Microsoft Azure outage is yet another reminder of the weakness of centralised systems, just like last week when AWS went down and caused havoc,” said Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element, a secure communications platform used by governments.
“The trouble with big centralised systems – be it Microsoft Azure, AWS, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack or Zoom – is that they suffer global outages because they have single points of failure,” he told SiliconRepublic.com. “True resilience comes from decentralisation and self-hosting.”
The incidents have also invited further calls for improved digital sovereignty.
“Governments, especially, need to urgently rethink their infrastructure strategies,” added Hodgson. “A rogue nation state or cybercrime gang can bring countries to their knees by attacking centralised systems. Governments have to prioritise their digital sovereignty.”
Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider Civo, echoed this sentiment, stating that the Microsoft and AWS outages are a “wake-up call for governments and enterprises alike”.
“Why are so many critical UK institutions, from HMRC to major banks and airports, reliant on infrastructure hosted thousands of miles away?
“When incidents like this happen, digital sovereignty means having control, and right now, too much of ours is outsourced,” he told SiliconRepublic.com. “The concentration of cloud power among a handful of US hyperscalers creates fragility at the heart of our economy.
“A single configuration error outside our borders shouldn’t be able to ground flights at Heathrow or disrupt parliamentary systems in Scotland.”
Just this week, University of Limerick’s Prof Donna O’Shea spoke to us about how digital sovereignty is “central” to cybersecurity.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
