Massive Azure outage knocks out Microsoft 365 and Xbox – what we know so far

Azure is down everywhere.

Microsoft

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Microsoft Azure went down globally today.
• Microsoft customer-facing services such as Microsoft 365 and Outlook were affected.
• We don’t know why it happened or when it will be fixed.

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, and many of us were miserable. This week, it’s Microsoft Azure’s turn to fall down and go boom, and once more, we’re pretty darn unhappy about it. 

Microsoft says this latest Azure outage began at approximately noon ET on October 29. However, Downdetector, which relies on user reports, shows the problems surfaced earlier, around 11:40 a.m. 

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Unlike the AWS failure, which — while massive in its damage — was limited to a single region (AWS East), according to the Azure Status page as of 1:30 p.m. ET, all Azure regions are down. 

It may not be as bad as the cloud service monitoring company StatusGator claims, “Azure is down, and so is half the internet,” but it’s more than bad enough. Reports of Azure failures are flooding in from around the world.

We still don’t know what caused this. Microsoft states: “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 was 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.”

Making matters worse, Azure users are reporting that “Our entire framework went down on @Azure, but nothing is showing on the status page. Azure portal is broken and cannot view any services.” In other words, many people can’t even get a grip on exactly which of their services are down. 

Which sites and services are affected?

Ordinary people are feeling the pain as well. Popular services such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Intune for business users and Xbox Live and Minecraft for people just wanting to have fun are also down. Others are reporting that Microsoft logins are also slowing to a crawl or failing entirely.  

The following services have been affected:

• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Copilot
• Microsoft Entra
• Microsoft Store
• Microsoft Teams
• Minecraft
• Xbox 

It’s a bad day if you rely on Microsoft.

But, as Ookla telecom analyst Luke Kehoe said, “Microsoft Azure has knocked many services offline worldwide, with a wide blast radius across airlines, banks, and government agencies. It is the second such event this month, highlighting the systemic risks of concentration and single points of logical failure, regardless of how physically hardened the infrastructure is.” 

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He’s got a point. We rely too much on AWS, Azure, and other cloud services that, when push comes to shove, turn out to be single points of failure. 

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