The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox and Minecraft began experiencing outages around noon Eastern Time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft called an “inadvertent configuration change.” The incident, which marks the second major outage of a cloud provider in less than two weeks, highlights the instability of an Internet built largely on infrastructure managed by a few tech giants.
Microsoft’s problems stemmed specifically from Azure’s Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings announcement. The company’s website, including its investor relations page, was still down as of Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was also experiencing intermittent issues.
Microsoft described in status updates Wednesday that it followed a process of sequentially restoring recent versions of its environment until it could identify the “last known good configuration.” At 3:01 p.m. ET, the company said it had identified and pushed this stable configuration and that “customers may start to see the first signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement: “We are working to resolve an issue with Azure Front Door that is affecting the availability of certain services. Customers should continue to check their service health alerts.” The company did not immediately respond to WIRED’s questions about the nature of the configuration change that caused the outage.
As well as happening on Microsoft’s earnings day, the outage comes nine days after Azure rival Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that affected sites and services around the world. Leading cloud providers, often called “hyperscalers,” often standardize and improve basic security and reliability for their customers, but issues and outages can cause them to become single points of failure for large populations of critical digital services.
“Even Azure’s outage status page is down,” says Davi Ottenheimer, longtime head of security operations and compliance and vice president at data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Another configuration change error: we are more than ever in the era of integrity violations.”
Azure blocked customers from making changes to the configuration of their instances while it worked to resolve the issue. The company said in a status update at 3:22 p.m. ET that it expects the situation to be “completely alleviated” by 7:20 p.m. ET.
“Organizations may think they are isolated by their choice of cloud provider, but the dependencies run deeper,” says Munish Walther-Puri, an IANS Research associate faculty member and former director of cyber risk for New York City. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages demonstrate the fragility of our digital infrastructure.”
