Microsoft faces outages in Azure and 365 services ahead of earnings release

Microsoft experienced widespread outages on Wednesday, affecting its Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 services just hours before the company's quarterly earnings release.

Users reported issues accessing websites and services hosted on Microsoft's platform, including key company sites like Xbox and the investor relations page. According to data from Downdetector, which monitors user-reported issues, the disruptions began around 11:40 AM ET.

A Microsoft spokesperson stated via email: " We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. 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 Azure support account on X (formerly Twitter) confirmed, "We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services," with users experiencing difficulties accessing various services.

The latest update on the Azure status page indicated that the issue started with Azure Front Door (AFD) around noon ET, and customers, including Microsoft’s services using AFD, may experience delays, connection timeouts, and errors. Microsoft attributed the issue to an unintended configuration change and is working to roll back to the last known working configuration.

Microsoft reported seeing good recovery signals in multiple regions and expects the issue to be fully resolved by 7:40 PM ET.

Over a dozen Azure services were affected, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop. Microsoft 365 also confirmed that its services were impacted as a result of the Azure issues.

This outage comes just a week after AWS, a major competitor, experienced a significant service disruption on October 20, causing several websites to go offline for the day. AWS acknowledged increased error rates while attempting to launch new servers in its EC2 service.

According to Canalys, AWS led the cloud infrastructure market in Q1 with a 32% market share, followed by Azure at 23%, and Google Cloud at 10%. Azure and Google Cloud have been growing faster due to the rising demand for AI processing power.

Both Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company), and Amazon are scheduled to report earnings this week, with Microsoft and Google announcing their results after the market close on Wednesday, and Amazon following on Thursday.

In addition, Alaska Airlines reported that it experienced a critical system outage on Wednesday afternoon, affecting its website and services. This is due to some of the airline’s services, including those of Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines, being hosted on Azure. Alaska Airlines recently closed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines last year.

Earlier in March, Microsoft faced a similar service disruption over a weekend, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access Outlook and other services.

Source: CNBC