In case you weren’t sleeping last night, or connected through Microsoft’s online services, you might have experienced some unintended downtime. A Microsoft Azure outage caused a number of Microsoft services to go offline and stop working temporarily.
Azure Cloud, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, Copilot, and other Microsoft services were offline and out of reach for millions of users for several hours globally. Online Xbox gamers and corporate workforce alike were obviously more than a bit perturbed because of the unexpected Microsoft services’ outage.
According to an official update, Microsoft confirmed the unfortunate Azure outage was caused by an inadvertent configuration change and DNS failures in Azure Front Door, which is Microsoft’s key content delivery and traffic-routing service for all their hosted online applications.
“An inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door (AFD) triggered a widespread service disruption affecting both Microsoft services and customer applications dependent on AFD for global content delivery. The change introduced an invalid or inconsistent configuration state that caused a significant number of AFD nodes to fail to load properly, leading to increased latencies, timeouts, and connection errors for downstream services,” Microsoft posted on its official Azure status history page – a place where it proactively reports about Azure cloud’s health and maintenance events.
Also read: Why did Microsoft Azure crash? Company reveals surprising cause behind global outage
At the time of writing this, Microsoft Azure outage has been reversed, and all services seem to be working fine and available online. Additionally, Microsoft said that, “safeguards have since been reviewed and additional validation and rollback controls have been immediately implemented to prevent similar issues in the future.”
That’s not the end of it, though. Microsoft Azure’s team will be thoroughly investigating this service outage by way of an “internal retrospective to understand the incident in more detail” and has promised to share their findings within 14 days to all impacted customers.
Lest you forget, AWS experienced an outage on October 19-20, 2025, caused by a DNS race condition in DynamoDB’s internal management system lasting over 14 hours. In comparison, Microsoft Azure’s outage occurred on October 29, 2025, triggered by an inadvertent configuration change to Azure Front Door that caused DNS issues. While both were fundamentally DNS failures, AWS’ outage originated from a subtle software bug in their control plane, whereas Azure’s was caused by a human configuration error.
Microsoft Azure’s outage only lasted about 5 hours, according to official reports, but had a global impact. Whereas the AWS outage was far longer in terms of services going offline, but were largely concentrated in the US East region.
Also read: AWS outage explained: How it differs from past Crowdstrike or BGP internet outages
