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Microsoft Azure experienced a major global outage, interrupting cloud services including the Azure portal and Microsoft 365 apps for businesses worldwide. Several users experienced the outage as their accounts and profiles started to crash. Following widespread disruptions, the company has now revealed the root cause.
According to the company’s official Azure status page, the outage started at 9:15 PM IST on October 29 and continued till 05:35 AM IST on October 30, 2025. The interruption affected thousands of customers worldwide and removed access to multiple consumer and enterprise services running on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.
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.
Some web pages on Microsoft also directed users to an error notification that read "Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request."
Interestingly, the disruption occurred just before the company’s Q3 earnings announcement.
The problem started from a configuration error within Azure Front Door (AFD), the company’s global content delivery and routing service. It began with an unintentionally deployed invalid configuration that resulted in inconsistencies.
The issue escalated to a large number of AFD nodes going offline. As nodes dropped out, traffic routing became unbalanced, leading to timeouts and latency spikes even in partially functional regions.
Microsoft temporarily “disabled all further configuration changes to AFD and initiated a rollback to the previous stable setup to stabilize the situation,” according to reports.
“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 stabilize.
Microsoft also revealed that the “fault was caused by a software flaw that allowed the incorrect configuration to bypass built-in safety checks.”
Notably, this is the biggest Microsoft outage after the CrowdStrike outage, which affected millions of users globally with the Blue Screen of Death error.
After hours of speculation, Microsoft has also confirmed that its Azure cloud platform is now back and fully operational.
Also Read: Free Microsoft Azure Course for Absolute Beginners in 2025
Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, has a global network of data centers. It allows organizations to build and manage applications without maintaining their own physical infrastructure.
Azure serves as the backbone for critical systems across banking, healthcare, travel, government, and entertainment. When it fails to function correctly, the ripple effects are immediate and global.
To avoid future incidents like this, the company has implemented new validation layers and automated rollback systems.
With more than 200 products and services, it competes directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. Unlike the AWS failure last week, which was limited to a single region (AWS East), the Azure outage affected all regions worldwide. It remains to be seen whether the outages persist after the tech giant fully resolves these errors.
