Microsoft has reported an 18% increase in quarterly sales, reaching $77.7 billion, surpassing Wall Street expectations

Microsoft said late on Wednesday it had resolved an outage of its Azure cloud platform that had impacted the tech giant's suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

The Microsoft Store has joined the growing list of services affected by a major outage sweeping across the tech giant’s ecosystem. Alongside Azure, Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365, the Store’s downtime is compounding users' frustrations and fueling speculation about what’s really going on.

Microsoft Corp. is still suffering from a computing capacity crunch despite massive spending on data centers, a scenario that weighed on the company’s closely watched Azure cloud unit.

Microsoft says users of its Azure cloud portal may be not be able to access Office 365, Minecraft or other services due to issues with its global content delivery network services.

Microsoft services including Outlook, Minecraft and Xbox Cloud Gaming experienced widespread outages Tuesday, disrupting access for millions of users worldwide. The company said it was investigating the cause of the outage, which began early in the day and affected sign-ins and online gameplay across multiple platforms.

The company reported that it spent a higher-than-expected $34.9 billion in capital expenditures during its quarter.

Reports of issues with Azure began spiking on DownDetector at around 12PM ET, coinciding with reports of an outage across Microsoft 365 and Xbox. It seems the outage may be global, as some Reddit users based in the US and UK say they’re unable to access Azure’s portal as well.

Microsoft and OpenAI unveil a deal extending IP rights, adding independent AGI verification, and giving both sides more freedom while maintaining Azure ties.

OpenAI and Microsoft reached a deal to complete the startup's shift to for-profit. Jason Hiner, editor in chief for ZDNET, joins to break down the deal's impact.