Thousands of Microsoft users across the globe faced a major service disruption on October 29, as both Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 suffered widespread outages that left many unable to access essential services. Outage-monitoring site Downdetector reported that the problems began around 11:40 am ET (or 9:10 pm IST). The outage quickly spread to users in the United States, Europe, and Asia, making it one of Microsoft’s most significant service interruptions in recent months. According to Downdetector, more than 16,000 users reported issues with Azure, while nearly 9,000 faced problems with Microsoft 365 services like Outlook, Teams, and the admin center.
Businesses relying on Azure’s cloud systems were unable to access the Azure Portal and manage their hosted applications, while users of Microsoft 365 struggled to send emails and join Teams meetings. Meanwhile, the software giant acknowledged the disruption through its official service status pages, confirming that some users may be experiencing issues accessing the Azure Portal. The company also stated that access to the Microsoft 365 admin center was affected and that users might face delays in Outlook, failed add-ins, and unstable network connections.
However, the company clarified that the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack or security breach, but rather by an internal network configuration issue. Initial investigations indicated that the outage was triggered by an inadvertent configuration change within Azure Front Door (AFD), the company’s global content delivery and load-balancing platform that manages traffic routing for Azure and Microsoft 365 services. This configuration error disrupted AFD’s ability to properly direct network requests, leading to a loss of availability across multiple regions.
“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 — blocking all changes to the AFD services and rolling back to our last known good state,” the Satya Nadella-led firm noted.
Importantly, the outage had a global impact, with users from India, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States among those most affected. As of now, the company has not released a detailed post-incident report outlining the root cause and long-term mitigation measures. But the Redmond-headquartered company is expected to publish a full explanation once the investigation concludes and all services are fully stabilized.
This latest disruption follows a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier in October, which caused temporary blackouts across multiple digital platforms. Even last year (2024), Microsoft experienced a large-scale outage that disrupted services like Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive for several hours due to a faulty update by CrowdStrike.
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