Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services experienced significant disruptions on Wednesday, impacting users globally just hours before the company’s scheduled quarterly earnings announcement.
Reports surfaced across social media platforms detailing difficulties in accessing services hosted on Microsoft’s infrastructure. The company’s own web assets, including Xbox and investor relations pages, also became intermittently unavailable. Downdetector, a service that aggregates user-reported incidents, indicated that the issues began around 11:40 a.m. ET.
“We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services,” a Microsoft spokesperson stated via email. “Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”
The Azure support account on X acknowledged the incident, stating they were “investigating an issue impacting several Azure services,” and that “customers may experience issues when accessing services.”
The Azure status page indicated that problems originated with Azure Front Door (AFD) at approximately noon ET, leading to “latencies, timeouts and errors” for customers and Microsoft services reliant on AFD. The company believes an “inadvertent configuration change” triggered the cascade of issues and initiated a “rollback to our last known good state” for AFD services.
Microsoft later reported “strong signs of improvement across affected regions” and anticipated full mitigation by 7:40 p.m. ET. The outage affected a considerable number of Azure services including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop.
Microsoft’s 365 status account confirmed the downstream effects, stating its services were “experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage.”
This incident arrives shortly after a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20th, which brought down a multitude of websites. AWS attributed the disruption to “increased error rates” for customers attempting to launch new instances in EC2.
The cloud infrastructure market is currently led by AWS with a 32% share, according to Canalys data from the first quarter. Azure holds the second position with 23%, followed by Google Cloud at 10%. Notably, Azure and Google Cloud have exhibited faster growth rates in recent periods, largely fueled by the increasing demand for artificial intelligence workloads.
Beyond Microsoft’s core services, Alaska Airlines acknowledged disruptions to “key systems” on Wednesday afternoon, including its websites, due to its reliance on Azure for hosting various Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services. This adds another layer of complexity given Alaska’s recent $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines.
The disruptions underline the inherent risks associated with concentrated cloud dependency. Experts highlight that while cloud providers offer robust redundancy and disaster recovery mechanisms, misconfigurations, software bugs, or even targeted attacks can still lead to widespread outages. This incident serves as a potent reminder for businesses to diversify their cloud strategies where possible, implementing multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud architectures to mitigate single points of failure and enhance resilience.
Furthermore, the timing of the outage, so close to the earnings release, raises concerns about potential financial impact. Analysts will be closely scrutinizing Microsoft’s forward guidance and commentary on the incident during the earnings call. The incident could raise questions about the reliability of Microsoft’s infrastructure at a time when it is heavily investing in and promoting its cloud services for AI and enterprise solutions. How Microsoft addresses this issue and prevents future incidents will be critical for maintaining customer trust and continued growth in the competitive cloud market.
This wasn’t Microsoft’s first service interruption this year. In March, a widespread outage impacted tens of thousands of users, preventing access to Outlook email and other applications.
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