Xbox One did not have a great start with the online store, Xbox Live, going down on the release date. The service was down for a few hours.
While Microsoft was gearing up for its next generation console release many of the excited gamers were finding it hard to access the Xbox Live. Other services from Microsoft like Outlook, Skydrive and Office 365 were also affected by the outage.
Microsoft issued an apology following the disruption. "We are experiencing an issue with Storage connecting to the network in North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, East Asia, East US and West US," said Microsoft, reports gigaom. "We are actively investigating this issue and assessing its impact to our customers. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the impact. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers."
Apparently, the outage was a result of the Windows Azure failure. Windows Azure is a computing platform from Microsoft that looks into the connectivity issues of the applications and the services of the company. The computing service is presently going though some technical glitches, resulting in its 'performance degradation.'
However, Microsoft refuted the claim stating that the Windows Azure failure and the outage were in no way linked to each other.
"Microsoft is aware of issues involving cloud and online services and we are investigating the cause. We can confirm that these issues were not caused by Windows Azure, said Microsoft, according to a recent post on Tech Crunch. "We will keep our customers updated as information becomes available. The service interruption that affected Windows Azure Storage was a separate issue and has been resolved. All Windows Azure services are running as normal."
In fact, many of the Azure watchers claimed the outage to be a Domain Name System issue. This was confirmed by Microsoft's corporate VP Scott Guthrie, sometime later on Twitter. "Azure is not having issues (customer apps continue to run fine). The problem is a DNS name server issue outside of azure," tweeted Guthrie to one Microsoft fan, Sai Nayagar.
Microsoft is still investigating the issue but the good news is that the site is working fine again.