Massive Azure Outage Recovery Efforts Underway - Here's The Latest

Azure is down everywhere.

Microsoft

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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• Microsoft Azure went down globally today.
• Microsoft customer-facing services were affected.
• Recovery is expected soon.

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, and galore of america were miserable. This week, it's Microsoft Azure's move to autumn down and spell boom, and erstwhile more, we're beautiful darn unhappy astir it. 

Microsoft says this latest Azure outage began astatine astir noon ET connected October 29. However, Downdetector, which relies connected personification reports, shows nan problems surfaced earlier, astir 11:40 a.m. 

Latest update

As of 5:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft reported, "We initiated nan deployment of our 'last known good' configuration, which has now successfully completed. We are presently recovering nodes and re-routing postulation done patient nodes."

Don't get excessively excited, though. We're not done yet. Microsoft continued, "As betterment progresses, immoderate requests whitethorn still onshore connected unhealthy nodes, resulting successful intermittent failures aliases reduced readiness until much nodes are afloat restored. This betterment effort involves reloading configurations and rebalancing postulation crossed a ample measurement of nodes to reconstruct afloat operational scale. The process is gradual by design, ensuring stableness and preventing overload arsenic limited services recover. We expect continued betterment crossed affected regions. This intends we expect betterment to hap by 23:20 UTC connected 29 October 2025." 

That's 7:30 p.m. Eastern.

Even if that's a success, different problems will persist for a time. Microsoft added, "Customer configuration changes stay temporarily blocked to forestall caller deployments that could interfere pinch recovery. We will notify customers erstwhile this artifact has been lifted. Customers tin failover to origins if they determine to."

The institution continued, "Customers whitethorn besides see implementing existing failover strategies utilizing Azure Traffic Manager to redirect postulation from Azure Front Door to their root servers arsenic an interim measure." This, I should add, is acold from an easy fix. If your unit isn't knowledgeable pinch Azure postulation routing, I'd grit my teeth and hold for Azure to travel wholly backmost online.

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Unlike nan AWS failure, which -- while monolithic successful its harm -- was constricted to a azygous region (AWS East), according to nan Azure Status page arsenic of 1:30 p.m. ET, each Azure regions were down. 

We still don't cognize what caused this. Microsoft said earlier today: "Starting astatine astir 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting successful a nonaccomplishment of readiness of immoderate services. We fishy that an inadvertent configuration alteration was nan trigger arena for this issue. We are taking 2 concurrent actions wherever we are blocking each changes to nan AFD services and astatine nan aforesaid clip rolling backmost to our past known bully state."

Which sites and services are affected?

Ordinary group felt nan symptom arsenic well. Popular services specified arsenic Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Intune for business users and Xbox Live and Minecraft for group conscionable wanting to person nosy person besides been down. Others reported that Microsoft logins were besides slowing to a crawl aliases failing entirely.  

The pursuing services person been affected:

• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Copilot
• Microsoft Entra
• Microsoft Store
• Microsoft Teams
• Minecraft
• Xbox 

It's been a bad time if you trust connected Microsoft.

Alaska Airlines suffered interruptions to its captious soul systems, including its website and operational infrastructure. Vodafone successful nan UK and Heathrow Airport were besides reported to person been affected by nan outage.

Behind nan scences, Microsoft now reports that nan pursuing Azure services were affected: App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel, Video Indexer, and Virtual Desktop. 

Earlier, Ookla telecom expert Luke Kehoe said, "Microsoft Azure has knocked galore services offline worldwide, pinch a wide blast radius crossed airlines, banks, and authorities agencies. It is nan 2nd specified arena this month, highlighting nan systemic risks of attraction and azygous points of logical failure, sloppy of really physically hardened nan infrastructure is." 

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He's sewage a point. We trust excessively overmuch connected AWS, Azure, and different unreality services that, erstwhile push comes to shove, move retired to beryllium azygous points of failure. 

Be that arsenic it may, successful its latest quarterly report, which came aft nan doorbell connected nan aforesaid day, Microsoft reported that it had hit nan Wall Street estimates and that Azure's income grew by astir 40%. Still, pinch this ongoing nonaccomplishment and Microsoft admitting that it can't support up pinch AI and unreality demands, Microsoft's banal sank little successful after-market trading.

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