New Delhi, Oct. 30 -- Websites for Heathrow Airport, NatWest and Minecraft were back online late Wednesday after being disrupted by a widespread Microsoft outage that affected multiple services across the globe. According to Downdetector, thousands of users reported difficulties accessing several major websites for several hours. Microsoft confirmed that some Microsoft 365 users experienced service delays, particularly with Outlook, but said that by 21:00 GMT, most affected sites were back online after the company "restored a prior update."

The company's Azure cloud computing platform, which powers many internet services, had earlier reported a "degradation of some services" around 16:00 GMT, citing "DNS issues" - the same root cause beh...