Minecraft Is Down
Credit: Microsoft
Fans of the wildly popular video game Minecraft woke up to bad news Wednesday morning. Despite releasing in 2009, Majong’s blocky building-and-survival game is still played by thousands of gamers every day and remains a YouTube sensation.
Today, of course, you cannot play Minecraft. The game’s servers are down as part of a wider Azure Front Door outage. A number of gaming platforms, including Xbox, have also been impacted by the outage. Servers for games like Helldivers 2 and Sea of Thieves have also been impacted. Major reporting spikes on DownDetector confirm that players across the globe are experiencing issues.
Other Microsoft services like Microsoft 365 and Outlook are also experiencing issues, though the company plans to set things right. How long that will take remains up in the air, though it appears some services may be returning to normal.
We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue,” Microsoft said in an update. “We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.”
Basically, this means that the outage was caused by an accidental configuration change – a setting or update that inadvertently broke something in the system. Microsoft is freezing all updates and configuration changes, have identified at least part of the problem and have turned off that network route or configuration path, and are reverting the system back to a working version.
This comes on the heels of the major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage which impacted games like Fortnite and Roblox and websites and apps as wide-ranging as Coinbase and Signal. As more and more websites, apps and games are hosted on major web services like Azure and AWS, and these become increasingly connected, any major outage will have enormously wide-ranging repercussions.
Fortunately, there are always other games to play. If you like Minecraft, consider checking out Terraria or Dragon Quest Builders 2. Maybe dip your blocky fingers into Factorio or No Man’s Sky. You never know, you might find something you like even more.