The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures

Microsoft Azure cloud The widely used Xbox 365, Xbox, and Minecraft services began experiencing outages around noon ET on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was an “unintended configuration change.” The incident — which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks — highlights the instability of an Internet largely built on infrastructure run by a few tech giants.

Microsoft’s issues specifically stemmed from Azure’s Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings announcement. The company’s website, including an investor relations page, was still down as of Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was also experiencing intermittent issues.

Microsoft described in status updates on Wednesday that it had gone through the process of sequentially retrieving recent versions of its environment so it could determine the “last known good configuration.” At 3:01 PM ET, the company said it had identified and pushed this stable configuration and that “customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently restoring nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”

“We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that impacts the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their service health alerts,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. The company did not immediately respond to WIRED’s questions about the nature of the configuration change that caused the outage.

In addition to occurring on Microsoft’s earnings day, the outage comes nine days after Azure competitor Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that affected sites and services around the world. Major cloud providers, often called “hyperscalers,” standardize and often improve the core security and reliability of their customers, but problems and outages can cause them to become single points of failure for a large number of critical digital services.

“Even the Azure outage status page is broken,” says Davey Ottenheimer, a longtime security operations and compliance director and VP of data infrastructure at Inrupt. “Another configuration change error. We are now in an era of integrity violations more than ever.”

Azure has blocked customers from making configuration changes to their instances while it works to address the issue. The company said in a status update at 3:22 PM ET that it expects the situation to “fully mitigate” by 7:20 PM ET.

“Organizations may think they are isolated by their choice of cloud provider, but the dependencies run deeper,” says Monish Walter Puri, an adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and former director of cyber risk for New York City. “When key partners rely on other companies with scale, exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages demonstrate the fragility of our digital backbone.”