Microsoft And Twitter Outages Hit In Day Of IT Doom

A slew of major cloud-based services went down today, including Microsoft’s Azure platform and Twitter, whilst more technical issues have hit RBS and NatWest customers.

Yesterday evening and through to this morning, the government’s G-Cloud store was out of action and earlier today Google Talk went down for users across the world in a day of significant IT failures. Soon after Google’s service went down, it emerged the Azure platform was experiencing outages across Western Europe.

Microsoft’s problems started just before midday today and continued into the afternoon. At 1.33PM, the company claimed to have fixed the problem. “The issue has been addressed. Full service functionality has been restored in the region. Storage accounts and running applications were not impacted throughout the duration of the incident. We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers,” the company said on its Azure status page.

Tweet-twoops!

Twitter later confirmed an issue, with Twitter.com and related services reportedly down for many.

“Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” the micro-blogging firm said on its status page. Messages were starting to filter through at the time of publication, but the service was still disrupted with tweets and profile images not fully loading.

Both Microsoft and Twitter have been hit by recent outages. Just last month Twitter was out for more than an hour, whilst Azure had problems in March when a leap year bug hit. Microsoft said that was because of “a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year”.

Today will do nothing to ease fears around moving to the cloud. Just this month, Amazon, the biggest cloud provider in the world, was hit by storms, causing major websites based on its infrastructure to go down, including Netflix and Instagram.

Meanwhile, it appears as though RBS customers are experiencing more issues today. “Some of our customers are experiencing technical difficulties this afternoon with online banking and debit cards. We are working hard to resolve this and will provide an update as soon as possible,” a spokesperson said.

Customers have complained they are unable to use their bank cards or access online banking services.

Nationwide has also admitted hundreds of thousands of its account holders have had funds taken from their account twice, claiming human error was to blame.

The problems come just a matter of weeks after major IT failures at RBS left many of its customers, including those of NatWest, without funds or the ability to transfer money.

How well do you know the cloud? Take our quiz!