The bug, which began at 1600 GMT, affected Azure Front Door, the company's content delivery network service that is used by enterprise customers to optimize application performance.

The crowdsourced error reporting site DownDetector showed problems across a wide spectrum of customer-facing websites, including Xbox, Alaska Airlines and retailer Costco.

Configuration changes are routine in technology operations -- companies make them constantly to improve services, add features, or fix problems.

However, even a small error in configuration can cascade through highly interconnected systems and spread almost instantly to cloud customers worldwide.

"We're investigating an issue impacting Azure Front Door services. Customers may experience intermittent request failures or latency. Updates will be provided shortly," Microsoft said on its Azure support account on X.

Last week, a different outage in Amazon's crucial cloud network, AWS, saw popular internet services ranging from streaming platforms to messaging services to banking taken offline for hours.

AWS leads the cloud computing market, followed closely by Microsoft's Azure, with Google Cloud in third place.

Businesses, governments and consumers worldwide rely on their infrastructure for online activities.