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New Delhi: Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services faced a massive outage on Wednesday, disrupting websites, business tools, and even the company’s own pages just hours before its quarterly earnings release. The issue left many users unable to access apps like Outlook, Teams, and Xbox services, while Azure customers around the world reported timeouts and connection errors.
The company confirmed that the disruption was linked to Azure Front Door (AFD), a service responsible for delivering content and balancing network traffic globally. According to Microsoft’s preliminary report, the outage began at 15:45 UTC on October 29 and lasted until 00:05 UTC on October 30, impacting both Microsoft services and third-party applications running on Azure.
Microsoft said the outage was triggered by an “inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door” that created an invalid configuration state. This caused many Azure nodes to fail to load correctly, leading to widespread slowdowns and connection errors.
“As unhealthy nodes dropped out of the global pool, traffic distribution across healthy nodes became imbalanced,” the company explained. The imbalance increased latency and caused service interruptions even in regions that were only partially affected.
To prevent further damage, Microsoft blocked all configuration changes and began restoring services using a “last known good” configuration. Engineers had to reload configurations across thousands of servers and gradually rebalance traffic to avoid overload as nodes came back online.
The incident affected a large number of Microsoft’s core and customer-facing products, including:
Some users continued to experience minor delays even after services were restored, though Microsoft said most systems returned to normal by early Thursday morning.
In a statement shared during the outage, Microsoft said, “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services.” The company also directed customers to check their Azure Service Health page for live updates.
A few hours later, Microsoft confirmed that the outage was caused by a “faulty tenant configuration deployment process.” A software defect allowed an invalid deployment to bypass existing safety checks. Microsoft has since reviewed its validation systems and added extra rollback and control mechanisms to prevent a similar issue.
Microsoft said it will conduct an internal retrospective and publish a final Post-Incident Review (PIR) within 14 days, detailing what exactly went wrong and what changes are being made to avoid a repeat. The company also noted that configuration changes to Azure Front Door remain temporarily blocked until the system is fully stable.
The outage came at a delicate time for the company, just ahead of its earnings report, which showed strong growth in Azure’s cloud business. It also followed a major outage at Amazon Web Services earlier in October, which affected websites across North America.
For now, Microsoft has restored most services, but it is still addressing lingering issues for a small group of customers. The company says it will continue to monitor performance closely before lifting all restrictions.
