Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella leaves after a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House in Washington on September 4, 2025.
Eric Lee | Bloomberg | fake images
microsoft was hit by outages to its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company’s quarterly results were released.
Social media users reported problems accessing its sites and services running on Microsoft products, and the company’s websites, including its Xbox and investor relations pages, were down. The problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which is based on user reports.
“We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Customers should continue to review their service status alerts and the latest update regarding this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”
The Azure support account on
The latest update on Azure’s status page says that the issues began with AFD around noon ET, and that Microsoft customers and services using AFD “may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors.” The company said it suspects an “involuntary configuration change” was the trigger and is “returning to our last known good state” for AFD services.
Microsoft said it is “seeing strong signs of improvement in affected regions and is moving toward full mitigation” at 7:40 p.m. ET.
The company listed more than a dozen Azure services that were affected, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop.
Microsoft’s 365 Health account wrote that its services are “experiencing further impact related to the current Azure outage.”
The service disruptions come just over a week after a larger rival Amazon Web Services reported a major outage that caused numerous websites to go down. Throughout the day on October 20, AWS said it saw “increases in error rates” from customers attempting to launch new instances on EC2, its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.
AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market in the first quarter, according to Canalys. Azure comes in second at 23%, followed by Google’s cloud unit at 10%. azure and Google The cloud has been growing more rapidly lately, driven by a boom in artificial intelligence workloads.
All three companies report their quarterly results this week, starting with Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday after the bell. Amazon reports Thursday.
Alaska Airlines said Wednesday afternoon that it is currently “experiencing an outage to key systems,” including websites, due to the outage in Azure, “where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted.” Alaska closed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year.
In March, Microsoft suffered a weekend outage that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
LOOK: Microsoft hit with Azure, 365 outages
