What caused the Azure outage? Microsoft reveals
What's the story
Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, along with its popular 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft, experienced a major outage on Wednesday. The disruption was caused by "an inadvertent configuration change," according to the tech giant. This incident is the second major cloud provider failure in under two weeks and highlights the vulnerability of an internet largely dependent on infrastructure managed by a few tech giants.
Service impact
Issues traced back to Azure's Front Door
The problems with Microsoft's services were traced back to Azure's Front Door content delivery network. The outage came just hours before Microsoft's earnings announcement, leaving its website and investor relations page inaccessible. Even the Azure status page, where Microsoft usually updates users on service health, was experiencing intermittent issues during this period.
Recovery efforts
Microsoft rolls back recent versions to address outage
In response to the outage, Microsoft launched a process of sequentially rolling back recent versions of its environment. The goal was to identify the "last known good" configuration that could restore services. The company later announced that it had found and deployed this stable configuration, stating, "Customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery."
Twitter Post
The issue has now been mitigated
🛠 Engineers have confirmed that an issue which impacted a subset of Azure services is now mitigated. A detailed resolution statement has been posted to the Azure Status History page here: Azure status history | Microsoft Azure
— Azure Support (@AzureSupport) October 30, 2025
Cloud failures
Azure outage follows AWS disruption
The timing of the Azure outage is particularly notable as it comes just nine days after a major disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The previous incident affected websites and services globally, including popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Despite their standardization and improvement of baseline security for customers, these hyperscalers can become single points of failure for critical digital services during such outages.
Sector impact
Outage impacts airlines and airports
The Azure outage has affected several sectors, including Alaska Airlines and Britain's Heathrow Airport. The former reported a disruption to its key systems due to the Azure issue, while the latter's website was down earlier in the day but has since been restored. Vodafone was also affected by this incident.