Cloud outage hits Microsoft Azure services across industries

• A Microsoft Azure Front Door misconfiguration caused regional outages.
• Microsoft rolled back the change and said services were improving.

Service issues hit Microsoft’s Azure platform on Wednesday, affecting a range of cloud tools and software across multiple regions. The outage disrupted access to websites and services that depend on Azure, and users shared complaints across social media as the problems spread.

Some of Microsoft’s own sites, including Xbox and investor relations pages, were also unavailable. Downdetector, which collects reports from usersshowed outages starting around 11:40 a.m. ET.

“We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email. “Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”

Azure’s support account on X said the team was looking into problems affecting several services, and warned that some customers might have trouble accessing them.

Microsoft’s status page stated that the issue began shortly before noon ET with Azure Front Door, a tool used for routing and delivering traffic. Customers reported delays, timeouts, and other errors. The company said an “inadvertent configuration change” likely set off the disruption and that engineers were undoing the change to return systems to a stable state.

Later updates said the platform was “seeing strong signs of improvement” across impacted regions, and the company aimed for full recovery by 7:40 p.m. ET. More than a dozen Azure services were affected, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop.

Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 noted that its products were facing downstream effects linked to the Azure outage.

This incident comes shortly after Amazon Web Services dealt with a wider outage on October 20when many customers saw errors while trying to launch new EC2 instances. AWS holds about 32% of the cloud infrastructure market, according to Canalys. Azure follows at 23%, with Google Cloud at 10%. Azure and Google have been growing faster recently due to rising demand for artificial intelligence workloads.

The ripple effects reached several industries. Alaska Airlines said disruptions hit key systems, including its website, and services came back online as Microsoft worked through the issue. Heathrow Airport in the UK also went offline temporarily—along with Vodafone being impacted as well.

Azure reported again that systems were improving by early evening. Other affected products included Azure Communication Services and Media Services.

Microsoft’s outage follows the earlier AWS disruption, which brought down thousands of sites and popular apps such as Snapchat and Reddit. Microsoft 365 reiterated that its problems were tied to Azure, adding that a recent configuration change caused the failure.

Starting around noon ET, customers that rely on Azure Front Door reported a range of access issues. By 6:49 p.m. ET, user reports to Downdetector had dropped sharply, falling from more than 18,000 earlier in the day to about 230. Reports tied to Microsoft 365 dropped from nearly 11,700 to 377 during the same period. Downdetector’s totals are based on user submissions, and real numbers may differ.

The AWS disruption last week was the largest internet outage since a CrowdStrike software issue caused systems to fail at hospitals, banks, and airports last year. The back-to-back cloud failures have renewed concerns about dependence on a small number of providers.

Nicky Stewart, Senior Advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition, responded to the outage by saying, “Today’s major Microsoft Azure outage, coming just days after the widespread AWS disruption, highlights the systemic risk of Europe’s dependence on the two dominant cloud providers. Successive outages on this scale show how a single technical fault can ripple through essential services, public infrastructure, and the wider economy. The pattern of repeated disruption underlines the urgent need for diversification, and the CMA must move at pace to implement remedies that foster a more open, competitive, and interoperable cloud market, one where resilience comes from choice, not dependence on the two dominant providers.”

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