Microsoft Grapples with Major Azure and 365 Outages Ahead of Earnings Report

Microsoft faced widespread service disruptions across its Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 suite on Wednesday, just hours before releasing its quarterly earnings.

Users across social media platforms reported difficulties accessing various Microsoft-powered services and sites, including Xbox and the company’s investor relations page, both of which were temporarily offline. According to Downdetector, reports of outages began around 11:40 a.m. ET, indicating widespread impact across multiple regions.

“We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. “Customers should continue to monitor their Service Health Alerts for the latest updates.”

Microsoft’s Azure Support account on X confirmed that engineers were investigating an issue affecting several Azure services, noting that customers may encounter latency, timeouts, or access errors. The company later revealed that an “inadvertent configuration change” likely caused the disruption and that teams were rolling back to a previous stable state.

By Wednesday evening, Microsoft said it was “seeing strong signs of improvement” and expected full mitigation by 7:40 p.m. ET. More than a dozen Azure services were affected, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop.

The Microsoft 365 team also confirmed that its products were experiencing “downstream impact” from the Azure outage.

The timing of the incident drew additional attention, coming just days after rival Amazon Web Services (AWS)experienced a similar major outage on October 20, which disrupted numerous websites and applications.

According to Canalys, AWS remains the market leader in cloud infrastructure with 32% market share, followed by Microsoft Azure at 23% and Google Cloud at 10%. Both Azure and Google have recently accelerated growth amid a surge in artificial intelligence workloads.

Adding to the ripple effects, Alaska Airlines reported system disruptions tied to the Azure outage, affecting services also used by Hawaiian Airlines. Alaska, which completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year, confirmed that several operational systems were temporarily impacted.

This marks Microsoft’s second significant outage this year. In March, a similar incident left tens of thousands of users unable to access Outlook and other productivity apps over an entire weekend.