Microsoft Azure, the firm’s cloud service, experienced an outage merely a week following complications with AWS which affected large portions of the internet. The challenges impacted Microsoft’s services on Azure, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and even Minecraft. Other firms, such as Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Starbucks, also encountered outages tied to the Azure issues.
On Azure’s status page, Microsoft indicated that the outage was related to an “unintentional configuration change” and a DNS issue. As Microsoft announced its earnings on Wednesday afternoon, its primary website continued to load with delays as the outage persisted.
An update on Microsoft’s status page at 7:40 PM ET provided this insight:
Beginning around 16:00 UTC on 29 October 2025, customers and Microsoft services utilizing Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced delays, timeouts, and errors. We have identified that an unintentional configuration change was the triggering factor for this issue.
Potentially affected Azure services included, but were not limited to:
App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Azure Virtual Desktop, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID (Mobility Management Policy Service, Identity & Access Management, and User Management UX), Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel (Threat Intelligence), and Video Indexer.
The AFD service is now functioning at over 98% availability. While the majority of customers and services are either mitigated or experiencing significant improvement across affected areas, we are actively working on restoring service for the remaining impacted customers and services. We have updated our mitigation time and are currently aiming for complete mitigation by 00:40 UTC on 30 October 2025, although we will notify if mitigation occurs sooner.
The Xbox Support X account also states that gaming services have reverted to their pre-incident condition; however, some players noted they had to restart their consoles to reconnect.
At 12:25 PM ET, Microsoft 365’s status account on X mentioned that the company is looking into reports of “problems accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.” A Microsoft 365 update issued at 1:02 PM ET indicated that the company “identified sections of internal infrastructure that are having connectivity issues,” and that it is working to “redirect affected traffic to restore service health.” Meanwhile, Xbox’s status page experienced loading issues temporarily, but that has since returned to normal.
The outage had ramifications beyond Microsoft’s services, as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines reported that they were “currently facing a disruption to key systems, including our websites” due to issues related to Azure. The airlines advised customers to meet with an agent at the airport to receive their boarding pass if online check-in was unavailable.
Community Fibre, an internet provider in the UK, also verified that some customers may have faced difficulties stemming from the Microsoft outage. Additionally, Kroger informed customers that its website and mobile applications were “experiencing an unforeseen outage,” while websites and apps for Starbucks and Costco were not loading, and users reported problems with Capital One.
Update, October 29th: Added information on recovery.
