Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, is experiencing an outage just one week after issues with AWS took out swaths of the internet. The issues appear to be impacting Microsoft’s services that run on Azure, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and even Minecraft.
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 as 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.
The Azure support page says Microsoft doesn’t have an ETA for when it will finish rolling back the change that may have caused the outage.
At 12:25PM ET, Microsoft 365’s status account on X said the company is investigating reports of “issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.” A Microsoft 365 update posted at 1:02PM ET said the company “identified portions of internal infrastructure that are experiencing connectivity issues,” and that it’s working to “reroute affected traffic to restore service health.” Meanwhile, Xbox’s status page isn’t even loading.
The outage goes beyond Microsoft’s services, as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines say they are “currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites” due to issues with Azure. The airlines advise customers to see an agent at the airport to get their boarding pass if they can’t check in for their flight online.
Community Fibre, an internet provider in the UK, similarly confirmed that some customers may be experiencing issues due to the Microsoft outage. Additionally, Kroger is telling customers that its site and mobile apps are “experiencing an unexpected outage,” while Starbucks’ and Costco’s websites aren’t loading, and users are reporting issues with Capital One.
The outage comes just hours before Microsoft is set to report its earnings results this afternoon. The Verge reached out to Microsoft with a request for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.
Reports of issues with Azure began spiking on DownDetector at around 12PM ET, coinciding with reports of an outage across Microsoft 365 and Xbox. It seems the outage may be global, as some Reddit users based in the US and UK say they’re unable to access Azure’s portal.