Microsoft outage cripples Azure, Microsoft 365, and Xbox
The disruption comes one week after Amazon's AWS suffered a major failure.
UPDATE, Oct 29: Microsoft said late on Wednesday it had resolved an outage of its Azure cloud platform that had impacted the tech giant's suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
"While error rates and latency are back to pre-incident levels, a small number of customers may still be seeing issues, and we are still working to mitigate this long tail," Microsoft Azure said, adding that the incident lasted for over 8 hours.
Microsoft suffered one of its most severe cloud disruptions in years on Wednesday, as a major failure in its Azure Front Door infrastructure knocked out access to critical services including Microsoft 365, Azure Portal, Xbox, and even the company’s flagship game, Minecraft.
The outage, which began around 16:00 UTC, left millions of users worldwide unable to log in or access cloud resources, exposing the deep interdependence between Microsoft’s internal and customer-facing systems. The incident disrupted businesses running on Azure, employees trying to access corporate files on Microsoft 365, and gamers attempting to connect to Xbox Live or Minecraft servers.
In a statement, Microsoft confirmed that “we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services,” adding that “customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal.” The company said it had “failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues” and was “continuing to assess the situation.”
While the company offered limited technical details, Azure Front Door is Microsoft’s global content delivery and application acceleration service, effectively the front gate through which much of its cloud traffic flows. A malfunction in this layer can cascade across multiple products, as appeared to be the case Wednesday.
Microsoft said engineers were “actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure” and would provide updates within the hour. The company did not indicate how long it expected the outage to last, or how many regions were affected.
