Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will step down after a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House on September 4, 2025 in Washington.
Eric Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images
microsoft suffered an outage in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company announced its quarterly results.
Users on social media reported that they were experiencing problems accessing their sites and services that run on Microsoft products, and that the company’s website, including its Xbox and investor relations pages, were down. According to Downdetector, which is based on user reports, the issue started around 11:40 a.m. ET.
“We are working to address issues impacting Azure Front Door that impact the availability of some services,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Customers should continue to monitor service health alerts. The latest updates regarding this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”
X’s Azure support account said it was “investigating an issue affecting multiple Azure services” and that “customers may experience issues accessing the service.”
According to the latest update on Azure’s status page, the issue with AFD began around noon Eastern time, and customers using AFD and Microsoft services “may have experienced delays, timeouts, and errors.” The company said it suspected “an inadvertent configuration change” was the trigger and that the AFD service was “rolled back to its last known good state.”
By 7:40 p.m. ET, Microsoft said it was “seeing strong signs of improvement across the affected regions and is tracking toward full mitigation.”
The company cited more than a dozen Azure services that were affected, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop.
Microsoft’s 365 Status account writes that its services are “affected downstream in connection with the ongoing Azure outage.”
The service interruption comes a little more than a week after a larger rival’s attack. Amazon Web Services reported a major outage that brought down numerous websites. Throughout the day on Oct. 20, AWS announced that it observed “increased error rates” for customers attempting to launch new instances on EC2, a popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.
According to Canalys, AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market as of the first quarter. Azure comes in second with 23%, followed by Google’s cloud division with 10%. with azure google The cloud has been growing rapidly recently due to the boom in artificial intelligence workloads.
All three companies will report quarterly results this week, starting with Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet after the bell on Wednesday. Amazon reported on Thursday.
alaska airlines announced Wednesday afternoon that an outage in Azure, “where several Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted,” is currently “impairing key systems,” including its website. Alaska completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year.
In March, Microsoft suffered a weekend outage that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
Spotlight: Microsoft hits Azure, 365-day outage
