Microsoft Azure Restored After Major Outage: What Went Wrong Hours Before Q3 Results

Microsoft Azure Outage Fully Resolved

Microsoft has confirmed the complete restoration of its Azure cloud services following a widespread outage that lasted several hours — just before the tech giant’s Q3 earnings announcement. The disruption affected millions of users globally, impacting key services such as Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, and Copilot.

Azure Status History notes the outage was caused by a configuration error in Azure Front Door, one of the key content delivery and routing services of the company. Due to the issue, cascading failures occurred across various regions, leading to service interruptions to the businesses and consumers alike.

Afterwards, Microsoft went through with a rollback to a stable configuration, with services gradually getting restored over a period of several hours.

Azure Outage Explained

Between 15:45 UTC on October 29 and 00:05 UTC on October 30, 2025, customers using Azure Front Door (AFD) experienced widespread latency, timeouts, and connectivity errors.

The outage affected several Azure products and services, including:

• Azure App Service
• Azure Active Directory B2C
• Azure Communication Services
• Azure Databricks
• Azure Healthcare APIs
• Azure Maps and Portal
• Azure SQL Database
• Azure Virtual Desktop
• Microsoft Copilot for Security
• Microsoft Sentinel, Defender, and Purview

While error rates and latency have now returned to normal, Microsoft noted that a small number of customers may still face minor issues as systems stabilize. Configuration changes to Azure Front Door remain temporarily blocked until Microsoft fully verifies stability.

What Went Wrong

Microsoft revealed that the incident stemmed from an inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door. This faulty update introduced an inconsistent configuration state, causing multiple nodes to fail and resulting in intermittent global service disruptions.

As unhealthy nodes were taken offline, traffic shifted unevenly to remaining servers, worsening latency and availability issues even in partially functional regions.

To contain the problem, Microsoft:

• Blocked all further configuration changes to prevent further propagation.
• Deployed a “last known good” configuration across its global network.
• Restored nodes gradually to avoid overloads and ensure a stable recovery.

Further investigation traced the root cause to a defect in Microsoft’s deployment validation system, which failed to block the faulty configuration. The company has since introduced additional safety checks, rollback controls, and validation layers to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Microsoft Q3 Results: Resilience Amid Disruption

Despite the outage, Microsoft reported strong Q3 earnings, emphasizing the continued momentum of its Intelligent Cloud segment.

CEO Satya Nadella highlighted that Azure maintained double-digit growth, reflecting the company’s ongoing focus on resilience, reliability, and innovation. He also noted accelerating adoption of Microsoft Copilot across Microsoft 365, Bing, and enterprise tools — underscoring the company’s success in integrating AI across its product ecosystem.