Microsoft Sees Widespread Azure, M365 Outage Ahead Of Q1 Earnings

The issue started with a disruption at about 16:00 UTC with Azure Front Door (AFD) resulting in availability loss for some services, Microsoft said.

Every Microsoft Azure region worldwide saw network infrastructure issues Wednesday morning Pacific time amid a widespread outage affecting Entra, Purview, Defender and other cloud products and services within the Microsoft 365 suite.

The issue started with a disruption at about 16:00 UTC with Azure Front Door (AFD) resulting in availability loss for some services, Microsoft said on the online Azure status page. The vendor blamed “an inadvertent configuration change” as the likely culprit.

The outage comes just hours before the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant reports quarterly earnings for the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, not to mention days after a 15-hour outage by cloud rival Amazon Web Services. AWS parent Amazon.com reports quarterly earnings Thursday.

“We have initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration,” Microsoft said on the Azure status page at 18:11 UTC Wednesday. “This is expected to be fully deployed in about 30 minutes from which point customers will start to see initial signs of recovery. Once this is completed, the next stage is to start to recover nodes while we route traffic through these healthy nodes.”

Microsoft Azure Outage

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the AFD issue to CRN in an email Wednesday.

“Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page,” the spokesperson said.

Outage measurements website Downdetector showed almost 12,000 reports of Microsoft 365 outage at 9:13 a.m. Pacific Wednesday, with the number falling to almost 4,000 by 10:28 a.m.

The website showed almost 19,000 reports of Azure outages by 9:14 a.m. Pacific, with the number falling to almost 3,000 by 10:44 a.m.

Microsoft Outlook outage reports reached about 2,000 by 9:59 a.m. and remained at that volume at 10:44 a.m. Microsoft Store outage reports reached about 3,200 by 9:16 a.m., falling to about 1,600 by 10:46 a.m., according to Downdetector.

Alaska Airlines blamed the Azure outage in an X post Wednesday for disrupting the websites of Alaska and its Hawaiian Airlines brand, along with other systems.

“We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we navigate this issue,” Alaska said.

Azure Front Door Issues

As part of its remediation efforts, Microsoft failed the Azure management portal away from AFD for better access and called on users to try accessing the portal directly. The vendor recommended users try implementing failover strategies with Azure Traffic Manager.

Customer configuration changes were blocked during mitigation. As of 18:11 UTC Wednesday, Microsoft didn’t have an estimated time for full mitigation. The status page did show Azure Front Door working at multiple Azure regions by that time, including East U.S., East U.S. 2, South Central U.S. North Europe, West Europe and France Central.

The vendor did note on the status page that Azure management portal extensions were working correctly, but Marketplace-related endpoints and others might have a problem loading.

On a separate online M365 status page, Microsoft said users are unable to access the Microsoft 365 administrator center and may experience delays with other M365 services.

Admins were also seeing issues accessing some Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Intune functions, according to the vendor. Add-ins and network connectivity in Outlook also appeared disrupted.

Microsoft published a message on X, formerly Twitter, Wednesday at 9:21 a.m. Pacific first acknowledging an issue with Azure Front Door services, warning that users may experience latency and intermittent request failures.

The vendor posted at 9:26 a.m. Pacific noting reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 administrator center, later posting at 10:19 a.m. Pacific that a recent configuration change to a portion of Azure might be causing M365 issues. Microsoft’s online cloud status page has been intermittently unavailable during the outage.

Microsoft posted at 10:57 a.m. on X that it has halted the rollout of the impacting configuration change.

“We’re continuing to route service traffic away from affected infrastructure to recover service availability,” the vendor said. “In parallel, we’re working to revert the impacted infrastructure to a previous state.”

Microsoft later updated its online Azure status page to show recovery expected by 23:20 UTC Wednesday. If Microsoft meets that goal, Azure will have experienced a seven-plus hour outage.

Microsoft also updated its list of affected Azure services to include 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.

The vendor also confirmed that "an inadvertent configuration change" triggered the widespread outage.