Microsoft Azure outage: Here's what caused the outage, company's statement and more

Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and productivity services — Azure and Microsoft 365 — experienced a global disruption on Wednesday, just before the company’s quarterly earnings release. Users across regions reported difficulties logging into services and accessing the Azure portal. Downdetector data indicated that the problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET.

Key problems faced by users

Several users encountered issues accessing Microsoft’s websites and cloud platforms. Both Azure and Microsoft 365 services were affected, with reports suggesting downtime for the Azure portal and Microsoft 365 admin center. Acknowledging the problem, Microsoft’s support accounts on X confirmed that the company was investigating the root cause and applying fixes.

“We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services,” the Azure Support account posted. “Customers may experience issues when accessing services. Updates are provided via the Azure status.”

The Azure status page added that some customers “may be experiencing issues accessing the portal” due to a “loss of availability of some services” that began around 12:00 ET.

Similarly, the Microsoft 365 status account said, “We’re investigating reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.” It added that the company was “rerouting affected traffic to alternate healthy infrastructure as a near-term resolution while our investigation into the source of the issue is ongoing.”

What caused the Microsoft Azure outage

In a follow-up update, Microsoft identified the probable reason for the outage. “We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue,” the company stated.

It further explained, “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.”

Microsoft confirmed that it had shifted the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to help users regain access. “Customers now ought to have direct access to the Azure administration portal,” the update added, noting that rollback operations were still underway.