A technical issue in Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud platform today disrupted several online services operated by the tech giant and its customers. Notable affected customers included Starbucks Corp., Costco Wholesale Corp., and Capital One Financial Corp. Microsoft itself experienced outages in several of its consumer services.
The disruption also impacted Microsoft’s investor relations page, which became briefly inaccessible just before the release of its latest earnings report.
### Cause of the Outage
The outage was traced back to an error in Azure Front Door, Microsoft’s content delivery network (CDN). This CDN allows website operators to store copies of their content across dozens of server clusters worldwide. When a user visits a webpage, the CDN delivers the content from the nearest server cluster to speed up loading times.
Azure Front Door incorporates multiple features designed to reduce the risk of downtime. When one server cluster—referred to as an edge location—goes offline, user traffic is automatically rerouted to another edge location. There are more than 110 such clusters arranged into two rings: an inner ring and an outer ring. The outer ring is configured to take over if the inner ring experiences technical issues.
### Impact and Response
According to Microsoft, the outage began around noon Eastern Time. It affected Azure Front Door and more than a dozen other Azure services that rely on the CDN, including several cybersecurity products critical to customers’ cloud security.
Microsoft’s engineers identified the root cause as an “inadvertent configuration change.” They promptly initiated a rollback to the last known error-free configuration.
The most recent update on Microsoft’s status page states that the rollback has been completed and the team is currently “observing recovery.” Microsoft is actively rerouting requests from malfunctioning Azure Front Door nodes to fully recovered servers. However, some requests are still being directed to faulty nodes, which is causing “intermittent failures or reduced availability for a subset of customers.”
Despite these challenges, Microsoft reports that the service is “operating above 98% availability.”
### Preventative Measures
To minimize further technical issues, Microsoft has temporarily blocked customers from making configuration changes to their Azure Front Door deployments. Earlier in the day, some customers encountered difficulties making configuration updates via Azure’s management console. Microsoft resolved this by moving the console off Azure Front Door.
### Broader Context
This service disruption follows closely on the heels of a major outage at Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS). Just days ago, AWS’s US-EAST-1 data center cluster experienced an hours-long malfunction that impacted popular services including ChatGPT, Disney+, and Snapchat.
AWS later explained in a blog post that their outage was caused by a DNS system issue in the Amazon DynamoDB managed database service.
Notably, DNS problems also caused a large-scale Azure outage in 2021, which took several Azure and Microsoft 365 services offline for several hours.
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As cloud infrastructure continues to underpin essential services worldwide, events like these underscore the critical importance of robust configuration management and rapid incident response. Both Microsoft and AWS are actively working to restore full service functionality and prevent similar disruptions in the future.
https://siliconangle.com/2025/10/29/azure-outage-takes-multiple-microsoft-services-customer-websites-offline/
