A disruption of Microsoft services has affected sites such as Heathrow, NatWest, and Minecraft, causing access issues for users globally.

On Wednesday, a Microsoft service outage caused significant problems for numerous websites and services, including Heathrow, NatWest, and Minecraft, according to reports from Downdetector. Microsoft 365 users, which includes applications like Outlook and Teams, experienced difficulties, and the cloud computing platform Azure reported a 'degradation of some services.' Microsoft explained that the issues were caused by 'DNS problems,' similar to those that affected Amazon Web Services last week. Other affected sites in the UK include Asda and O2, while in the US, Starbucks and Kroger.

The company is working to reroute the affected traffic to restore services. Additionally, the Scottish Parliament's activities have been suspended due to technical issues related to the online voting system, suspected to be linked to the Microsoft outage.