Azure is down everywhere. Microsoft
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Microsoft Azure went down globally today.
Microsoft customer-facing services were affected.
Recovery is expected soon.
Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, and many of us were miserable. This week, it's Microsoft Azure's turn to fall down and go boom, and once more, we're pretty darn unhappy about it.
Microsoft says this latest Azure outage began at approximately noon ET on October 29. However, Downdetector, which relies on user reports, shows the problems surfaced earlier, around 11:40 a.m.
Latest update
As of 5:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft reported, "We initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration, which has now successfully completed. We are currently recovering nodes and re-routing traffic through healthy nodes."
Don't get too excited, though. We're not done yet. Microsoft continued, "As recovery progresses, some requests may still land on unhealthy nodes, resulting in intermittent failures or reduced availability until more nodes are fully restored. This recovery effort involves reloading configurations and rebalancing traffic across a large volume of nodes to restore full operational scale. The process is gradual by design, ensuring stability and preventing overload as dependent services recover. We expect continued improvement across affected regions. This means we expect recovery to happen by 23:20 UTC on 29 October 2025."
That's 7:30 p.m. Eastern.
Even if that's a success, other problems will persist for a time. Microsoft added, "Customer configuration changes remain temporarily blocked to prevent new deployments that could interfere with recovery. We will notify customers once this block has been lifted. Customers can failover to origins if they decide to."
The company continued, "Customers may also consider implementing existing failover strategies using Azure Traffic Manager to redirect traffic from Azure Front Door to their origin servers as an interim measure." This, I should add, is far from an easy fix. If your staff isn't experienced with Azure traffic routing, I'd grit my teeth and wait for Azure to come completely back online.
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Unlike the AWS failure, which -- while massive in its damage -- was limited to a single region (AWS East), according to the Azure Status page as of 1:30 p.m. ET, all Azure regions were down.
We still don't know what caused this. Microsoft said earlier today: "Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state."
Which sites and services are affected?
Ordinary people felt the pain as well. Popular services such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Intune for business users and Xbox Live and Minecraft for people just wanting to have fun have also been down. Others reported that Microsoft logins were also slowing to a crawl or failing entirely.
The following services have been affected:
Microsoft 365
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Entra
Microsoft Store
Microsoft Teams
Minecraft
Xbox
It's been a bad day if you rely on Microsoft.
Alaska Airlines suffered interruptions to its critical internal systems, including its website and operational infrastructure. Vodafone in the UK and Heathrow Airport were also reported to have been affected by the outage.
Behind the scences, Microsoft now reports that the following Azure services were affected: App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel, Video Indexer, and Virtual Desktop.
Earlier, Ookla telecom analyst Luke Kehoe said, "Microsoft Azure has knocked many services offline worldwide, with a wide blast radius across airlines, banks, and government agencies. It is the second such event this month, highlighting the systemic risks of concentration and single points of logical failure, regardless of how physically hardened the infrastructure is."
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He's got a point. We rely too much on AWS, Azure, and other cloud services that, when push comes to shove, turn out to be single points of failure.
Be that as it may, in its latest quarterly report, which came after the bell on the same day, Microsoft reported that it had beat the Wall Street estimates and that Azure's income grew by about 40%. Still, with this ongoing failure and Microsoft admitting that it can't keep up with AI and cloud demands, Microsoft's stock sank lower in after-market trading.
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