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Microsoft has confirmed that its Azure cloud platform is now back and fully operational after a massive global outage that disrupted big services including the Microsoft 365, Outlook, Copilot, and Xbox Live. Interestingly, the disruption occurred right before the company’s Q3 earnings announcement, affected millions of users worldwide and caused intermittent downtime across multiple regions, including India and the US.
SurveyAs per the company’s official Azure status page, the outage started at 9:15PM IST on October 29 to 05:35 AM IST on October 30, 2025. It stemmed from a configuration error within Azure Front Door (AFD), the company’s global content delivery and routing service.
The incident resulted in gradual failures across multiple platforms, including Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure SQL Database, Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Defender, and Microsoft Sentinel, among others.
What caused the Azure outage?
The problem started when an invalid configuration was unintentionally deployed, resulting in inconsistencies that caused a large number of AFD nodes to go offline. As nodes dropped out, traffic routing became unbalanced, resulting in timeouts and latency spikes even in regions that were partially functional.
To stabilise the situation, Microsoft temporarily disabled all further configuration changes to AFD and initiated a rollback to the previous stable setup. Recovery required reloading configurations on thousands of servers and gradually rebalancing global traffic to avoid overloads, the company stated. While the majority of services have returned to normal performance levels, some users may continue to experience minor latency issues as systems stabilise.
Microsoft also revealed that the fault was caused by a software flaw that allowed the incorrect configuration to bypass built-in safety checks. To avoid future incidents like this, the company has implemented new validation layers and automated rollback systems.
Notably, this is the biggest Microsoft outage after the CrowdStrike outage which affected millions of users globally with the Blue Screen of Death error.
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Ashish Singh
Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile
