Users of the Microsoft Store began reporting access problems starting at approximately 12:17 p.m. Eastern time Monday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, marking the third Microsoft service to draw user complaints within roughly 90 minutes on the same day.

Downdetector, an Ookla-owned platform that monitors more than 12,000 online services worldwide, posted on X shortly after the reports began surfacing. “User reports indicate problems with Microsoft Store since 12:17 PM EDT,” the account wrote, encouraging affected users to share how the disruption was impacting them under the hashtag #MicrosoftStoreDown. Separate outage-tracking service Entireweb similarly logged elevated activity for the Microsoft Store, recording 56 user reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of Monday, with six of those reports arriving within the final hour before its status check.

Monday’s Microsoft Store reports followed closely on the heels of two earlier disruptions affecting other Microsoft products the same day. Users had reported problems with Microsoft Outlook beginning around 11:53 a.m. Eastern time, and separate reports tracked by the online forum DesignTAXI Community indicated that broader Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook specifically, began showing elevated outage report volumes as early as 11:33 a.m. Eastern time Monday. The clustering of complaints across multiple Microsoft products within a relatively narrow window raised questions among affected users about whether the issues stemmed from a shared underlying cause, though Microsoft had not issued a public statement definitively linking the incidents as of Monday afternoon.

Microsoft’s broader cloud infrastructure, built primarily on its Azure platform, underpins a wide range of the company’s consumer and enterprise products, meaning that problems originating in shared backend systems can sometimes manifest as simultaneous disruptions across seemingly unrelated services. That dynamic played out dramatically during a major Microsoft outage in 2021, when a Domain Name System, or DNS, networking issue took down Microsoft’s homepage, Xbox and Office services, login pages, and even the company’s own status pages simultaneously, according to a contemporaneous report from TechCrunch. In that incident, Microsoft’s cloud service Azure also went offline, causing cascading outages across other websites and services that depend on Azure’s infrastructure, before the company confirmed the issue had been mitigated roughly seven hours after it began.

As of Monday afternoon, StatusGator’s monitoring of the broader Microsoft 365 apps category showed the service listed as operational, with only four user-submitted reports logged over the preceding 24-hour period as of a status check conducted shortly after 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, a discrepancy that illustrates how quickly outage-reporting metrics can shift and how different monitoring services can produce varying pictures of the same underlying situation depending on their data sources and update frequency.

Downdetector’s outage-tracking methodology relies on a combination of user-submitted complaints and automated web traffic monitoring rather than direct access to a company’s internal systems, meaning reported spikes in activity do not always indicate a complete platform-wide failure. Disruptions can instead reflect issues affecting a specific region, a particular version of an app or service, or a coincidental cluster of unrelated individual account problems. Even so, the near-simultaneous emergence of complaints across three separate Microsoft products in a single morning represents an unusual pattern that has drawn attention from users monitoring the company’s service status throughout the day.

Microsoft’s official Azure status page and its dedicated Microsoft 365 service health dashboard remain the most authoritative sources for confirming whether the company has formally acknowledged any of Monday’s reported issues. As of this report, Microsoft had not issued a public statement addressing the Microsoft Store outage reports specifically, and the company did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding whether Monday’s disruptions across Outlook, Microsoft Store and broader Microsoft 365 services were connected to a common underlying cause.

The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE) on Monday recorded a turnover of Rs 39,718 crore in the Closing Auction Session (CAS), accounting for 22 per cent of its total cash market turnover, on the first index rebalancing day since the mechanism was introduced earlier this month.

The exchange commanded a 99.9 per cent market share in the CAS, with more than 98,000 unique investors participating in the session, NSE said in a statement.

The turnover in Monday’s session was around 42 times the turnover recorded in the previous trading session.

The session coincided with the implementation of the MSCI August 2026 Index Review, which took effect at the close of trading on Monday. It was the first major index rebalancing after CAS went live in the Indian capital markets.

Index rebalancing days typically witness heavy trading towards the close as index funds, exchange-traded funds and other passive investors realign their portfolios based on changes in benchmark indices.

NSE said the strong turnover in the CAS demonstrated that index funds and passive investors executed their rebalancing trades through the mechanism.
Monday also marked the completion of one month of the closing auction session. During the first month, NSE recorded a cumulative CAS turnover of around Rs 63,000 crore, with a market share of 98.2 per cent.The CAS is a call auction mechanism used to determine the closing price of stocks in the cash segment on which derivative contracts are available.

Under the mechanism, buy and sell interest at the close of the market is aggregated into a single price discovery process, aimed at enhancing transparency, integrity and fairness in determining closing prices.

The mechanism was implemented from August 3 following the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) decision to introduce the closing auction session in the Indian capital markets.

NSE said the CAS brings the Indian market closer to global best practices for closing price discovery.

There’s a new frontier in job interviews and it goes something like this: Remove your Zoom background and pan your camera around the room. Now, could you please wave your hand in front of your face?

The ubiquity of AI-assisted answering—not to mention the risk of hiring candidates who might be lying about where they live, or even working for North Korea—has companies upping their screening tactics. They want to ensure the people they’re hiring really know what they’re talking about and are who they say they are.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Users of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure began reporting access problems starting at approximately 12:45 p.m. Eastern time Monday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, marking the fourth Microsoft product to draw user complaints within roughly two hours on the same day.

Downdetector posted on X shortly after the reports began surfacing. “User reports indicate problems with Microsoft Azure since 12:45 PM EDT,” the account wrote, asking affected users to describe how the disruption was impacting them under the hashtag #MicrosoftAzureDown. The Azure reports followed earlier Monday complaints involving Microsoft Outlook, which began drawing attention around 11:53 a.m. Eastern time, and Microsoft Store, which saw a similar spike in user reports beginning at 12:17 p.m., raising the possibility that Monday’s cluster of disruptions across multiple Microsoft products traced back to a shared underlying cause within the company’s infrastructure.

Azure serves as the backbone of much of Microsoft’s broader product ecosystem, hosting the cloud infrastructure that supports services including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live and countless third-party applications and websites built on top of Microsoft’s cloud platform. That interconnected architecture means disruptions originating within Azure’s core systems can cascade outward, producing what appear to be simultaneous, seemingly unrelated outages across multiple consumer-facing products at once.

Separate monitoring services offered a mixed picture of Azure’s status heading into Monday afternoon. Outage tracker 503Radar reported that Azure was operating normally as of 11:39 a.m. UTC Monday, before the reported issues began, and noted that the platform’s most recent confirmed outage had occurred Aug. 28, when a multiple-service disruption affecting West U.S. regions took roughly 23 hours to resolve. StatusGator, meanwhile, reported that a related product, Azure DevOps, was experiencing a partial outage as of Monday afternoon, with confirmed issues affecting pipeline services in Canada and artifact services in the United States, even as other Azure DevOps components remained listed as operational. StatusGator separately logged 14 user-submitted outage reports for the core Azure platform over the preceding 24-hour period as of an earlier Monday morning check.

Microsoft’s Azure platform has experienced a series of shorter regional disruptions in recent weeks, according to 503Radar’s incident tracking, including an issue affecting Southeast Asia on Aug. 25 that took nearly 13 hours to resolve, and a separate Azure Portal access problem affecting Australian regions on Aug. 14 that lasted more than 12 hours. Those incidents, along with the more recent Aug. 27-28 disruption in West U.S. regions, suggest Azure has faced a more active-than-usual stretch of regional service issues heading into Monday’s reported problems.

Microsoft maintains an official Azure status page, accessible at azure.status.microsoft, which the company updates in real time to reflect the health of its cloud services and to publish post-incident reviews following major outages with broad customer impact. According to Microsoft’s own documentation on the Azure Service Health system, the company distinguishes between incidents severe enough to prevent customers from accessing the status page directly, in which case Microsoft attempts direct customer communication, and broader service issues affecting undetermined numbers of customers or regions, which the company addresses through public status updates rather than individually targeted outreach.

As of Monday afternoon, Microsoft had not issued a public statement specifically linking the day’s reported issues across Outlook, Microsoft Store and Azure to a single root cause, and the company’s official status channels had not confirmed a major, broad-impact incident matching the scale suggested by the clustered Downdetector reports. Outage-tracking methodologies used by services like Downdetector rely on crowdsourced user complaints and automated web traffic monitoring rather than direct visibility into Microsoft’s internal systems, meaning reported spikes in activity do not necessarily confirm a company-wide failure, even when they cluster closely together in time.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the reported Azure disruption or whether it was connected to the earlier Outlook and Microsoft Store outage reports logged earlier the same day. Affected users have been encouraged to monitor Microsoft’s official Azure status page directly for the most authoritative and up-to-date information regarding the platform’s operational status.

A family battle over a billionaire’s fortune, from boats and a jet to Dallas Cowboys tickets, is rankling the board of a small regional bank in

Texas. 

Texas banking veteran Gerald J. Ford is ensnarled in a legal fight with some of his adult children over a large stake in Hilltop Holdings

HTH

-0.18%

decrease; down pointing triangle, the $2.2 billion financial-services holding company he forged. Four of Ford’s children—including son Jeremy, who took over as chair from Ford in 2025—are suing to wrest away control of their father’s more-than-26% stake in Hilltop, worth some $600 million.

Blackstone-backed Epsilon Bidco Pte Ltd may sell its entire stake of up to 26.4% in packaging solutions provider EPL Ltd through a block deal, in a transaction that could raise around Rs 1,985 crore, according to the reports.Epsilon Bidco is currently the largest shareholder in EPL, holding 8,44,79,781 shares, or 26.38% of the company, as of the quarter ended June 2026, according to BSE data.

The block deal has been launched at an offer price of Rs 235 per share, representing a discount of up to 10.3% to EPL’s prevailing market price. At the offer price, the proposed sale of 8.45 crore shares would fetch approximately Rs 1,985 crore.

EPL shares settled at Rs 262.06 apiece on the NSE on Monday, rising 4.02% from the previous close of Rs 251.94. At Monday’s closing price, Epsilon Bidco’s stake in the company was worth roughly Rs 2,214 crore.

The proposed transaction comes less than a month after EPL reported a strong operating performance for the first quarter of FY27.
On August 12, EPL said it recorded its highest-ever top-line growth of 25.3% in Q1FY27, despite significant external challenges and continued volatility in global markets. The company said this marked its fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth.
Growth was broad-based, with Beauty & Cosmetics and Oral Care growing more than 20%, while all regions recorded double-digit growth. On an underlying basis, excluding the pass-through impact of higher raw-material prices, revenue growth stood at 20%.
EPL’s EBITDA rose 15.2% year-on-year, marking the company’s 15th consecutive quarter of double-digit EBITDA growth. EBITDA margin stood at 18.8%, while the underlying EBITDA margin was 19.6%.

The company said it was able to pass on the entire increase in costs through pricing across regions.

EPL’s profit after tax declined 1.4% year-on-year in Q1FY27, but the company said PAT was in line with estimates and remained on track for double-digit growth for the full financial year. Profit before tax increased 10% year-on-year.

EPL attributed the difference primarily to the lower effective tax rate in the corresponding quarter of the previous year, which it expects to normalise over the full year.

About EPL

EPL Ltd is a speciality packaging company headquartered in Mumbai and listed on the BSE and NSE. The company has a presence across all five continents, with 21 facilities across 11 countries and a workforce of more than 6,000 employees representing 23 nationalities. Its portfolio includes laminates, laminated tubes, extruded tubes, caps, closures and dispensing systems.

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