Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform encountered a major operational failure on Wednesday, starting around noon Eastern Time. The company confirmed the issue on its Azure status portal, citing an “inadvertent configuration change” as the probable cause. A precise timeline for service recovery has not yet been shared.
As a result, multiple high-usage Microsoft services—including Microsoft 365 productivity suite, Xbox online gaming, and Minecraft—experienced outages. The ripple effects extended beyond Microsoft, causing website access problems for major retailers like Costco and Starbucks.
This outage emerges just hours before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, potentially impacting investor confidence. It also comes shortly after a similar incident last week involving Amazon AWS, where a DNS disruption affected a broad range of internet services, including financial and governmental operations.
This sequence of events highlights ongoing challenges faced by large-scale cloud providers in maintaining continuous service availability and resilience.
