Microsoft’s Azure cloud network faced a major disruption Wednesday, knocking out access to popular platforms including Office 365, Minecraft, and Xbox Live.
The issue, which Microsoft linked to its global content delivery system, has exposed the scale of dependence on the company’s traffic-routing backbone.
According to an update on the Azure status page, engineers are investigating problems tied to Azure Front Door, the service that directs user traffic across Microsoft’s global edge network.
When that routing layer falters, requests to cloud-hosted applications, including enterprise tools and gaming servers, fail to resolve.
“Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors. We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue,” the second-largest cloud computing platform globally said.
Microsoft says it is mitigating the issue
While Microsoft hasn’t released a detailed root cause, the company confirmed it is actively mitigating the issue.
“We have initiated the deployment of our last known good configuration, which is expected to complete within 30 minutes. As this deployment progresses, customers should begin to see initial signs of recovery. Once completed, we will begin recovering nodes and routing traffic through these healthy nodes,” Microsoft 365 said.
“We do not yet have an ETA for full mitigation, but we will provide another update within 30 minutes, once the deployment has complete,” it added.
Reports on Downdetector showed thousands of users experiencing outages on Office 365, Copilot, and Xbox Live. The glitch also hit Minecraft, one of Microsoft’s largest hosted ecosystems, interrupting gameplay worldwide.
Outage hits businesses
The outage also sent shockwaves through industries that rely on its cloud backbone. Alaska Airlines confirmed a “disruption to key systems,” including websites and services hosted on Azure.
The carrier, which recently completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines, said teams were working to restore normal operations.
The outage landed at a sensitive time, just hours before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings release and barely a week after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a similar meltdown that took down large swaths of the web.
During the day-long outage last week, customers encountered higher error rates while launching EC2 instances, Amazon’s core virtual server product.
AWS continues to dominate the cloud-infrastructure market with roughly 32 percent share, followed by Microsoft Azure at 23 percent and Google Cloud at 10 percent, according to Canalys.
However, Azure and Google have recently been expanding faster, fueled by surging demand for AI workloads.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft users have faced service disruptions. In March, an outage spanning an entire weekend locked tens of thousands of people out of Outlook and other Microsoft 365 programs.