In an update late in the day, Microsoft Azure confirmed that systems had largely recovered, though a few customers might still experience residual issues.
“While error rates and latency are back to pre-incident levels, a small number of customers may still be seeing issues, and we are still working to mitigate this long tail,” Azure said.
The disruption began around 12 p.m. ET, when customers using Azure Front Door—Microsoft’s global cloud-based content and application delivery network—started reporting timeouts and errors. The incident cascaded into related services, including Azure Communication Services, Media Services, and Microsoft 365, which experienced what the company described as a “downstream impact.”
By evening, Microsoft reported that the configuration change that triggered the outage had been fully resolved, restoring access for most users.
The outage had wide-ranging effects across industries. Alaska Airlines reported earlier that key systems, including its website, were down due to the Azure failure, though the airline said it began restoring services once Microsoft fixed the issue. Similarly, the website of London’s Heathrow Airport went offline temporarily, while Vodafone and other major organizations also reported disruptions linked to Azure.
According to Downdetector, which tracks outage reports, the number of users experiencing Azure issues peaked at over 18,000 before gradually dropping to around 230 by 6:49 p.m. ET. Reports of problems with Microsoft 365 fell from nearly 20,000 users at the height of the outage to just 77 later in the evening.
The incident follows a widespread disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week, which crippled thousands of websites and popular apps such as Snapchat and Reddit. That outage, along with the recent Azure failure, underscores the increasing fragility of the world’s cloud-dependent infrastructure.
Industry analysts say the repeated disruptions highlight the critical role of major cloud providers in sustaining global connectivity—and the growing risks when those systems falter.