Microsoft outage knocks sites and services offline

Microsoft stumbled back online Thursday after an hours-long outage in the middle of the U.S. west coast working afternoon.

Besides its homepage, Microsoft’s Xbox and Office services went down, log-in pages didn’t load, and the company’s status pages were also knocked offline by the outage. Worse, Microsoft’s cloud service Azure also fell offline, causing outages to any sites and services that rely on it.

Microsoft confirmed it was a networking issue. Microsoft also tweeted that it was related to DNS, the internet system that translates web addresses to computer-readable internet numbers. It’s an important function of how the internet works, so it’s not ideal when it suddenly breaks.

In the briefest of statements, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed at 7pm PT that it had “mitigated the issue.”