Microsoft's Azure gets knocked out a week after the big AWS outage, and once again it looks like a bug is to blame
If there's one thing last week's big AWS outage should have taught us, it's that putting all our eggs into one giant tech basket may not be a great idea. And in case we didn't adequately take that lesson to heart, here's another opportunity: Just hours before Microsoft is set to deliver its quarterly financial report, its Azure service is taking it on the chin. As reported by MSNBC, Azure cloud and 365 services are currently suffering widespread outages.
The problem first came to our attention by way of Obsidian, which said on Bluesky that The Outer Worlds 2, which launched today, might be temporarily unavailable on Xbox platforms "due to an ongoing Azure service outage." The Minecraft website has also been intermittently up and down for the past hour or so—I'm currently able to access it, but it's slow.
Due to an ongoing Azure service outage, The Outer Worlds 2 may be temporarily unavailable to purchase or install on Xbox Series X|S, the Xbox app on PC, and with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass.
— @obsidian.net (@obsidian.net.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:00:17.327Z
That sucks for sure, but it quickly became apparent that the problem is far more serious than just an inability to download a game from a storefront nobody uses much anyway.
"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, customers and Microsoft services that leverage Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced issues resulting in latencies, timeouts and errors," the Azure status site currently states. "We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue.
"We are taking several concurrent actions: Firstly where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services, this includes customer configuration changes as well. At the same time, we are rolling back our AFD configuration to our last known good state. As we rollback we want to ensure that the problematic configuration doesn't re-initiate upon recovery."
Azure holds 23% of the cloud infrastructure market, according to MSNBC, second only to AWS at 32%. And that makes this outage a big deal. Numerous sites and services are being impacted, like London's Heathrow airport and banking giant NatWest (via BBC), for instance.
As for what caused the problem, Microsoft said on X that "a recent configuration change to a portion of Azure infrastructure" is believed to be the culprit—distinct echoes of the AWS outage, which was reportedly also caused by a bug in the software.
We've identified a recent configuration change to a portion of Azure infrastructure which we believe is causing the impact. We're pursuing multiple remediation strategies, including moving traffic away from the impacted infrastructure and blocking the offending change.October 29, 2025
The company is now "pursuing multiple remediation strategies, including moving traffic away from the impacted infrastructure," and has halted the rollout of the change, but there is still no ETA as to when the problem will be fully fixed.