Why Did Microsoft Azure Outage Take Place? Here’s What The Company Said
Just hours before Microsoft’s earnings release, millions of users struggled to access Azure, Outlook, and Teams. The company later blamed a configuration change for the outage.
- Microsoft cloud services faced widespread outages before earnings release.
- Users reported inability to access Azure, Microsoft 365, and Teams.
- Company suspects accidental configuration change caused the widespread disruption.
Just a few hours before Microsoft’s earnings release, many users faced problems with its cloud services. People using Azure and Microsoft 365 said they couldn’t access websites, emails, or online tools. Even Microsoft’s own website stopped working for some time. The problem started around 11:40 a.m. ET, as reported by Downdetector. Later, Microsoft confirmed the issue and said its team was looking into it.
The company also promised to share updates every hour until things were fixed.
What Was The Microsoft Azure Outage About?
The outage affected many popular Microsoft services like Azure, Teams, Outlook, and the 365 Admin Centre. Users said they couldn’t log in, open files, or use online apps.
According to Microsoft, the issue began around noon ET and caused some services to go offline. The company also said that users might face delays while trying to open the Azure portal.
We're closely monitoring the environment to ensure the reversion has taken effect and that all infrastructure returns to a healthy state. In parallel, we're working to manually rebalance service traffic across the environment to achieve withstanding recovery. Users may continue…
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) October 29, 2025
Microsoft posted updates on its Azure status page, saying that engineers were still trying to find the main cause. The problem affected users in different parts of the world, but not all at the same level.
Microsoft added that they were studying what led to the service loss and were working to bring systems back online. They advised users to keep checking the Azure status page for live updates.
Microsoft’s Reply: We Suspect Configuration Change
A few hours later, Microsoft shared more details about the cause. The company said it suspects that an accidental configuration change triggered the outage. To fix it, Microsoft stopped all new updates to Azure Front Door (AFD) services and started rolling back to an earlier stable version.
Microsoft said: “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 disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.”
The company added, “We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update.”
Microsoft also said it has “failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) in order to address the portal access concerns.” Customers should now be able to directly access the Azure admin portal.
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