Key Points
- Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services experienced widespread outages on Wednesday, hours before its earnings release.
- The outage, affecting services like Xbox and investor relations pages, began around 11:40 a.m. ET.
- Microsoft suspects an “inadvertent configuration change” in Azure Front Door (AFD) as the cause and is rolling back to a previous stable state.
- The disruption follows a recent major outage at rival Amazon Web Services (AWS), highlighting concerns about cloud reliability.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services experienced widespread outages on Wednesday, just hours before the company was scheduled to release its earnings report. Users on social media quickly reported issues accessing their websites and services that rely on Microsoft’s products. Even Microsoft’s own websites, including Xbox and investor relations pages, were down. Downdetector, which tracks user reports, indicated the problems started around 11:40 a.m. ET.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the issue, stating, “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services.” They advised customers to check their Service Health Alerts and the Azure status page for updates. The Azure support account on X also posted about the investigation into an issue affecting “several Azure services,” noting that “customers may experience issues when accessing services.”
The latest update on Azure’s status page explained that the problems began with Azure Front Door (AFD) around noon ET. Customers and Microsoft services using AFD “may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors.” Microsoft suspects an “inadvertent configuration change” caused the outage and said it was “rolling back to our last known good state” for AFD services.
Microsoft expected services to recover by 7:20 p.m. ET. The company also suggested that “customers may also consider implementing failover strategies using Azure Traffic Manager to redirect traffic from Azure Front Door to their origin servers as an interim measure.”Microsoft’s 365 status account confirmed that its services were “experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage.”
These service disruptions follow a major outage reported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) just over a week ago, which took down numerous websites. On October 20, AWS observed “increased error rates” for customers trying to launch new EC2 instances.
AWS currently leads the cloud infrastructure market with a 32% share as of the first quarter, according to Canalys. Azure ranks second with 23%, followed by Google Cloud at 10%. Both Azure and Google Cloud have been growing rapidly lately, fueled by the booming demand for artificial intelligence workloads.
All three major cloud providers—Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, and Amazon—are scheduled to release their quarterly results this week. Microsoft and Alphabet report on Wednesday after the bell, with Amazon following on Thursday.
Alaska Airlines announced on Wednesday afternoon that it was “experiencing a disruption to key systems,” including its websites, due to the Azure outage. Several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted on Azure. Alaska completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year. This isn’t Microsoft’s first rodeo with outages; in March, a weekend outage left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
