Microsoft Azure down: What caused the outage? Which services are affected?
Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure suffered a major outage on Wednesday, October 29, disrupting access to many commonly used services around the world, including Office 365, Xbox Live, Minecraft and Copilot.
The issue stems from issues with Azure Front Door, the infrastructure that routes traffic in Microsoft’s cloud environment, and the domain name system (DNS), which directs internet traffic by converting URLs into IP addresses. DNS errors can completely prevent users from accessing applications and cloud services.
Microsoft said the outage began around 16:00 UTCis preventing many customers from accessing the Azure Portal and causing delays in the productivity suite.
“Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal… We have moved the portal away from Azure Front Door to mitigate portal access issues,” Microsoft said on its status page, adding that recovery efforts were ongoing and more updates were coming.
Impact across services
Reports collected by outage tracker Downdetector show:
-16,600+ user reports of Azure downtime
-Nearly 9,000 reports of Microsoft 365 errors
Users also flagged the following issues:
-Outlook connection and add-ons
-Minecraft login and gameplay
-Xbox Live multiplayer and account services
-Microsoft 365 Admin Center access
Microsoft advised customers to use PowerShell, CLI, and other programmatic tools as a workaround in case the portal becomes unavailable.
widespread outage
Because Azure supports countless online platforms, even partial failures can have global lasting impacts affecting businesses, gamers, and general users.
Microsoft says it is actively reviewing failover options within its infrastructure and investigating root causes as it works to restore services as quickly as possible.
Release Azure outage reports
User reports of Azure issues dropped to 4,584 by 1:07 PM ET, from a peak of over 18,000 earlier in the day, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Downdetector compiles outage data based on user-submitted reports; therefore the actual number of affected users may differ.
The Microsoft outage comes just a week after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that affected thousands of websites around the world, including popular platforms like Snapchat and Reddit. The AWS failure was the biggest internet outage since last year’s CrowdStrike failure, which paralyzed technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports and underlined the fragility of the world’s interconnected digital infrastructure.
