**Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services** were crippled by a major outage on Wednesday, creating widespread disruption for customers and impacting several of the company’s own high-profile services, including its Xbox and investor relations pages. The incident comes at a crucial time for the tech giant, occurring just hours before its scheduled quarterly earnings release.
The problems, first noted by users around **11:40 a.m. ET**, highlight the dependency modern businesses have on core cloud infrastructure, especially following a similar major outage suffered by competitor **Amazon Web Services (AWS)** just a week prior.
The Source of the Disruption: An Inadvertent Configuration Change
Microsoft quickly identified the source of the trouble, pointing the finger at its **Azure Front Door (AFD)** service—a global, scalable entry-point network.
- Trigger: Microsoft suspects the outage was triggered by an **”inadvertent configuration change”** within the AFD system, which caused “latencies, timeouts and errors” across services.
- Response: The company immediately began the process of **”rolling back to our last known good state”** for AFD services to restore stability.
- Impacted Services: More than a dozen core Azure services, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop, were hit. The outage also caused a **”downstream impact”** on Microsoft’s 365 services (which include Exchange, Outlook, and Teams).
Microsoft announced that it was “seeing strong signs of improvement” and was tracking toward **full mitigation by 7:40 p.m. ET**, though the hours-long downtime created immediate operational problems for major corporate clients.
Critical Client Operations Affected
The reliance on Azure by major corporations was immediately evident. **Alaska Airlines** confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that the outage was causing a **”disruption to key systems,”** including its websites, as several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted on the affected cloud platform.
The timing adds pressure to Microsoft, especially given the fierce competition in the cloud market. While AWS leads with 32% market share, Azure holds a strong second at 23% (Canalys data), and both are currently experiencing a boom driven by high-growth artificial intelligence workloads.
A Recurring Cloud Problem
This incident is the latest in a series of highly public cloud failures across the industry.
- Recent Precedent: Just last week, AWS experienced a **major outage** that temporarily took down numerous websites and services.
- Microsoft History: In March, Microsoft suffered a separate **weekend outage** that locked tens of thousands of users out of their Outlook email accounts and other critical programs, underscoring the challenge of maintaining perfect uptime on massively scaled global cloud networks.
The outages place a spotlight on the fragility of centralized cloud services just as Microsoft and rival cloud providers Google (Alphabet) and Amazon are preparing to report their quarterly earnings, with investor focus sharply trained on cloud revenue and reliability.
