Microsoft Azure, 365 Services Hit by Major Global Outage
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 suite experienced a significant global outage that began just before the company’s quarterly earnings call. Services are now recovering after Microsoft identified and addressed the root cause.
Key Developments
- Outage began around 9:10 PM IST (11:40 AM ET) on Wednesday
- Affected multiple Azure services and Microsoft 365 access
- Root cause identified as inadvertent configuration change
- Recovery confirmed by 1:58 AM IST with services largely restored
Initial Reports and Company Response
Users began reporting widespread issues accessing Microsoft services through Downdetector. Microsoft quickly acknowledged the problem through its official support channels.
We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services. Customers may experience issues when accessing services. Updates are provided via the Azure status
We’re investigating reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center. We’re rerouting affected traffic to alternate healthy infrastructure as a near-term resolution while our investigation into the source of the issue is ongoing.
Root Cause Identified
Microsoft later confirmed the outage stemmed from an accidental configuration change. The company implemented immediate corrective measures.
We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions: blocking all changes to the AFD services and disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, while simultaneously rolling back to our last known good state.
Service Recovery
By 1:58 AM IST, both Azure and Microsoft 365 services showed strong recovery signs. Microsoft confirmed service health had largely recovered, though impact reports hadn’t fully returned to normal levels.
Engineers are aware of an ongoing issue impacting a subset of Azure services and are we are now observing recovery. More information and emerging updates can be found on the Azure Status page.
We’ve confirmed that service health has largely recovered; however, user reports of impact haven’t yet returned to pre-incident thresholds. We’re continuing to monitor the service to ensure full recovery.
