On Wednesday, hours before Microsoft was scheduled to release its quarterly earnings report, its Azure cloud service and 365 office suite suffered unexpected service outages. Users reported on social media that they were unable to access their own websites and services running on Microsoft products; multiple Microsoft websites (including the official Xbox website and investor relations page) were also paralyzed. The problem began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, an outage monitoring platform that relies on user reports.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement: "We are working to resolve an issue affecting the Azure Front Door service that has resulted in reduced availability of some services. Users should continue to monitor the 'Service Health Alert' and the latest developments on this issue can be found on the Azure status page."
Microsoft's Azure support account for the X platform posted: "We are investigating an issue affecting multiple Azure services" and "users may experience failures when accessing services."
The latest update to the Azure status page shows that the problem originated in the Azure Front End Service (AFD) around noon ET, and that users of the service and Microsoft's own services "may experience delays, timeouts, or error messages." Microsoft said that it initially determined that the cause of the failure was "an unexpected configuration change" and that it was currently "rolling back the Azure front-end service to a previously confirmed normal state."
The statement mentioned: "As the rollback deployment progresses, users should gradually see initial signs of service recovery. Once the deployment is completed, we will begin to restore nodes and direct traffic through these normal nodes."
The Microsoft 365 service status account said that its services are "being affected downstream by the current Azure service outage."
The service outage occurred more than a week after Microsoft's main competitor Amazon's cloud service had just experienced a large-scale outage, causing a large number of websites to be paralyzed. On October 20, AWS said that "error rates increased significantly" when users tried to launch new instances of its popular cloud service EC2.
According to market research firm Canalys, as of the first quarter of 2025, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market with a 32% market share; Microsoft Azure ranks second with a 23% share; and Google Cloud ranks third with a 10% share. Recently, Azure and Google Cloud have grown faster than AWS, driven by surging demand for artificial intelligence workloads.
The three cloud service giants mentioned above all plan to release quarterly financial reports this week: Microsoft and Google parent company Alphabet will be the first to disclose their results after the market closes on Wednesday; Amazon will release its financial report on Thursday.
Alaska Airlines said on Wednesday afternoon that it was "experiencing outages in critical systems" (including its official website) due to an outage in Azure - "a number of Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines' services are hosted on the Azure platform." Last year, Alaska Airlines completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines.
In March, Microsoft experienced a service outage over a weekend that left tens of thousands of users unable to access Outlook mailboxes and other related programs.