The website for Christie’s, one of the world’s leading auction houses, is currently down as part of a global outage of Microsoft 365 and Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform.
When trying to access the site, visitors are prompted with a message, reading, “Our website is currently experiencing difficulties owing to a worldwide web hosting issue[.] We apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience.”
The message also includes the phone numbers for the house’s branches in London, New York, Paris, and Hong Kong, as well as its general inquiries email. The house does not have any live auctions scheduled for Wednesday, October 29.
A Christie’s spokesperson sent ARTnews the following statement about the outage: “A global Microsoft outage is impacting Christie’s digital platforms. We await a resolution from Microsoft.”
Other companies impacted by the Microsoft outage, according to Downdetector, include Minecraft, Xbox, Costco, Starbucks, Kroger, MyChart, and Alaska Airlines, which has caused passengers being unable to check-in to their flights or access their boarding passes through the company’s app.
In a statement first reported by Tech Radar, Microsoft said, “Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC [12pm ET], we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. … Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.”
As of 3:01pm ET, Tech Radar reported that Azure has stated that the company has “pushed our ‘last known good’ configuration, and customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes, and as we make progress in this workstream, customers will continue to see improvement.
“Customer configuration changes will remain temporarily blocked while we continue mitigation efforts. We will notify customers once this block has been lifted.”
