Microsoft Azure outage: Memes galore on social media—how netizens reacted

The websites for Heathrow Airport, NatWest, and Minecraft were back online late Wednesday after a global Microsoft outage affected multiple services worldwide. The outage affected Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 platforms, leading to widespread access issues.

According to Downdetector, thousands of users reported difficulties accessing several major websites for several hours. Microsoft confirmed delays for some Microsoft 365 users, particularly with Outlook. By 21:00 GMT, most affected sites were back online after the company “restored a prior update.”

Earlier, the company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which powers many internet services, reported a “degradation of some services” around 16:00 GMT, citing "DNS issues”. This was the same root cause behind last week's Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. Amazon later confirmed that AWS was operating normally.

In the UK, websites of Asda, M&S and O2 were among those affected, while in the US, users reported issues with Starbucks and Kroger. Some Microsoft web pages displayed error messages reading “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”

As the outage also disrupted access to Microsoft’s own service status page, the company shared real-time updates through a thread on X.

NatWest said that while its website was temporarily impacted, its mobile banking, web chat, and customer helplines continued to operate normally.

Meanwhile, frustrated users took to social media to express their annoyance — and, in some cases, responded with humour by posting memes about the outage.

Reacting to a post, one X user wrote: “I think it's broader than front door. Every service in our stack appears impacted. Including O365 apps and entra [sic].”

“Not just front door. Can’t access M365 admin portals, Azure admin portal etc [sic],” another commented.

“@AzureSupport, it's not only the Front Door, but all our back-end services are dead. Curiously, the only resource we have on Linux is still working,” a third user said.