Just weeks after AWS faced issues, it's now Microsoft's turn. Its cloud platform, Azure, is experiencing a massive global outage, affecting thousands of users worldwide—particularly in Europe and the United States.
According to Downdetector reports, over 16,600 people reported problems with Azure services and nearly 9,000 with Microsoft 365, impacting both cloud infrastructure access and Microsoft’s productivity tools like Outlook and Teams.
Azure Outages (Source: Downdetector)
Widespread Issues with Microsoft Azure
Many users have reported being unable to access Intune, the Azure portal, and the Exchange Admin Center. Others have noted that Azure Front Door CDN, responsible for optimizing content delivery, is also completely offline.
Among the hardest hit are organizations in the healthcare sector, which are facing authentication issues—workers are unable to log into internal networks or business platforms that rely on Azure.
One affected client shared:
“We’re aware that the Provider Portal login is currently unavailable due to a Microsoft outage affecting authentication services. Our team is actively working to restore everything and monitoring progress as Microsoft Azure systems recover.”
Microsoft acknowledged the incident and attributed the access problems to a DNS system failure, which caused intermittent errors and high latency when attempting to access services.
In its official status page, the company stated:
“Starting around 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues that degraded availability for some services. Customers may have difficulty accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken corrective actions which should resolve these issues shortly.”
Microsoft also warned that users might not be able to access the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and may experience delays in tools like Microsoft Purview, Intune, Outlook, and related network plugins. In Service Alert MO1181369, the company also confirmed that some administrators are facing failures when using key admin portal functions.
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Microsoft Responds to Azure’s Global Outage
Microsoft officially confirmed that both the Azure Front Door CDN service and the Azure portal are offline. While recovery efforts are underway, the company advised users to access resources via PowerShell or Azure CLI as a workaround if the portal remains unavailable.
In an update, the Azure team explained they are evaluating failover options within their infrastructure to restore services as soon as possible:
“We are actively reviewing recovery options for internal Azure Front Door (AFD) services. Investigation into contributing factors and restoration workflows is ongoing.”
Azure Service Health (Source: Microsoft Azure)
Meanwhile, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center reported they are redirecting affected traffic to alternative functional infrastructure as a temporary measure while root cause analysis continues.
Microsoft later updated its Azure incident report, confirming that the outage stemmed from an unintentional configuration change in Azure Front Door:
“Around 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing issues with Azure Front Door that caused a loss of availability across multiple services. We suspect an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger.”
The company stated it is currently executing two parallel mitigation actions:
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Blocking further configuration changes in Azure Front Door services.
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Reverting systems to the last known good state to stabilize the platform as quickly as possible.
This is a developing story. Microsoft continues investigating the root cause and is expected to release new updates through the Azure Status Portal in the coming hours.