Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, experienced a major outage just a week after a similar issue affected Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The disruption impacted several of Microsoft’s own services, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and Minecraft. Many well-known companies that rely on Azure, such as Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Starbucks, among others, also experienced downtime due to the incident.
According to Microsoft’s status page, the outage was caused by an unintentional configuration change that led to a DNS issue. While the company was reporting its earnings on Wednesday afternoon, its main website was loading slowly, adding to the disruption. Microsoft explained that starting around 16:00 UTC on October 29, 2025, customers using Azure Front Door experienced latency, timeouts, and errors. The company confirmed that the root cause was the accidental configuration change.
Several Azure services were affected, including App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure SQL Database, Azure Portal, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Databricks, and Microsoft Sentinel, among others. Microsoft stated that Azure Front Door services were operating at over 98 percent availability and that most customers were already seeing improvements. The company expects full recovery by 00:40 UTC on October 30, 2025, though it promised to update users if services stabilize sooner.
The outage also hit gaming services. Xbox Support confirmed that systems had been restored to their normal state, but some players needed to restart their consoles to reconnect. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 users reported difficulty accessing their accounts and the admin center. Microsoft acknowledged that certain parts of its internal infrastructure were facing connectivity problems and said it was rerouting traffic to restore performance.
The effects of the outage extended far beyond Microsoft. Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines reported disruptions to their booking systems and websites, asking passengers to check in at the airport. In the UK, Community Fibre confirmed that some customers faced issues due to the Azure problem. Retailers such as Kroger, Starbucks, and Costco also reported website and app outages, while users noted issues with Capital One’s online services.
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By late evening, Microsoft said that its configuration updates and traffic rebalancing were improving system stability across affected regions. Although most services had returned to normal, the company continued monitoring performance to ensure full recovery. The widespread outage served as another reminder of how dependent the modern internet has become on a few major cloud providers and how a single configuration error can disrupt millions of users worldwide.
