By bizn_fun 
On its service status page, external, Azure’s network infrastructure was showing as “critical” in every region in the world.
Exactly how much of the internet is impacted is unclear, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at around 20% of the global cloud market.
The firm said it believed the outage was a result of “an inadvertent configuration change”.
In other words, a behind-the-scenes system was changed, with unintended consequences.
Microsoft said it plans on fixing the problem by effectively replacing its service with a recent backup it knows was working properly.
But it could not give an estimate for how long this would take.
The concentration of cloud services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google means an outage like this “can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”