Multiple websites are down or not working properly this morning, including for Air New Zealand, police and Customs, and some ANZ customers say the bank’s app is again not working after thousands were affected by an outage yesterday.

The disruption comes as international media report global outages related to a Microsoft bug sparked by what the company called an “inadvertent configuration change” that affected its widely used Azure service.

Air NZ said it could cause delays at check-in and boarding today, while police said some of their websites weren’t working and people should call 111 in an emergency and 105 for non-emergencies.

The RealMe service - used to log on to multiple Government websites including IRD, Immigration and the Companies Office, has also been taken offline in the outage.

Four hours til full fix

In a post just after 9am NZT, Microsoft said it It had restored Azure to its “last known good configuration”. It anticipated full restoration of services “within the next four hours.”

An ANZ customer told the Herald the bank’s app had again stopped working as of 7am, but by 7.45am was working for her again.

Other customers also indicated the app wasn’t working this morning.

“It was working about 1am and now its off again grrr”, one woman wrote on an Auckland community Facebook page this morning.

It was not immediately clear if online banking was affected.

ANZ said this morning that service had been restored last night, but “we are aware a large number of people are logging into goMoney this morning and due to this some may experience a delay accessing the app”.

“We apologise to our customers for the disruption and the inconvenience [yesterday’s issue] caused.”

Meanwhile, Air New Zealand said the “global Microsoft outage is affecting some Air New Zealand systems and app functionality”.

“During this time, you may not be able to access our online services as usual.

“Our flights, both international and domestic, continue to operate, however, the outage is affecting some airport systems, which may cause delays at check-in and boarding.”

“If you’re travelling today, please allow extra time at the airport and keep a close eye on your flight information through the Air NZ website, or airport departure boards.”

Its contact centre was “receiving a high volume of calls” and it urged people to only call if travelling in the next 24 hours.

Police said their main website, newcops, and Firearms Safety Authority public-facing websites were affected.

“The outage is online only – users are still able to call 105 to make a non-emergency report, and please call 111 in an emergency.”

Agence France-Presse reported Microsoft cloud customers were experiencing widespread service disruptions after the company said an “inadvertent configuration change” affected its widely used Azure service.

The bug, which began at 4pm GMT (5am NZT), affected Azure Front Door, the company’s content delivery network service that is used by enterprise customers to optimise 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, Agence France-Presse reported.

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, Agence France-Presse reported.

“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, Agence France-Presse reported.

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