Azure Outage Disrupts Microsoft Services, Affects Thousands

On Oct. 29, Microsoft experienced a widespread Azure outage midday that left the Azure Portal, Microsoft 365, Xbox, Minecraft and numerous customer sites — including retailers and airlines — inaccessible for many users worldwide. Microsoft said status updates and reporting indicate the failure involved DNS disruptions and problems with Azure Front Door and that an inadvertent configuration change may have triggered the incident. Outage-tracking sites recorded large spikes of reports — totaling tens of thousands of affected Azure and Microsoft 365 users — with customers reporting authentication failures and loss of access to admin centers and portals. The incident coincided with reports of simultaneous problems at a major cloud rival, renewing concerns about dependence on a small number of cloud platforms. Microsoft engineers were investigating and applying mitigations while the outage — which arrived hours before the company’s quarterly earnings release — continued to disrupt business and consumer services.