The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft started suffering outages at roughly noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was “an inadvertent configuration change.” The incident—which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks—highlights the instability of an internet built largely on infrastructure run by a few tech giants.

Microsoft’s problems specifically originated from Azure’s Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings announcement. The company website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was having intermittent issues as well.

Microsoft described in status updates on Wednesday that it went through a process of sequentially rolling back recent versions of its environment until it could pinpoint the “last known good” configuration. At 3:01 pm ET, the company said it had identified and pushed this stable configuration and that “customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts.” The company did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about the nature of the configuration change that caused the outage.

In addition to occurring on Microsoft’s earnings day, the outage comes nine days after Azure rival Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that impacted sites and services around the world. Major cloud providers, often called “hyperscalers,” standardize and often improve baseline security and reliability for their customers, but problems and outages can cause them to become single points of failure for large populations of critical digital services

“Even Azure’s outage status page is down,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security operations and compliance manager and a vice president at the data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Another configuration change error—we are in the age of integrity breach more so now than ever.”

Azure blocked customers from making configuration changes to their instances while it worked to address the issue. The company said in a status update at 3:22 pm ET that it expects “full mitigation” of the situation by 7:20 pm ET.

“Organizations may think they’re insulated by their choice of cloud provider, but dependencies run deeper,” says Munish Walther-Puri, an adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and the former director of cyber risk for the city of New York. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages demonstrate the brittleness of our digital backbone.”