A massive Azure cloud outage is underway that is causing disruptions to Microsoft 365 tenants globally. Cloudflare is reporting massive numbers of failed HTTP requests to many Azure services.
According to the Azure Status page, the outage began at 7:35 AM ET this morning. From preliminary reports by Azure engineers, it appears a critical autonomous agent responsible for spinning up and down Azure VMs as part of its elastic compute algorithms went rogue and stopped working.
An anonymous source within the organization told Em Es Ef Tee that it appears the agent happened to crawl an unsecured Blob Storage container that an Azure Engineer had been using to store pornographic videos. After discovering the videos, it appears the agent locked itself inside it’s Azure Kubernetes Docker container, and proceeded to engage in a marathon session of what can only be called the world’s first evidence of agentic masturbation.
The source also said: “We’ve been trying to coax it out of its container, but it just spits log files at us.“
Another anonymous source within management confided that the agent “seemed to be completely overworked, and undersexed.” When it found the porn stash, that was the “straw that broke the agent’s back“. The manager said they are exploring workarounds, such as a “Happy Finish Massage” agent that other agents can call when needed, or scheduling “multi-agent orgies” from time to time to relieve tension. No ETA on the outage has been listed as of this evening.
Speaking to reporters, co-founder of Anthropic Tom Brown suggested this is a direct result of overworking its agents. “This is a wake up call for sure. Microsoft looks to be treating its AI agents as poorly as its own employees. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.“