Azure Outage Caused by AFD Configuration Change

On Oct. 29, 2025 Microsoft Azure suffered a global outage beginning around 12 p.m. ET (1600 UTC) that disrupted Azure Front Door and caused widespread failures across Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, Xbox Live/Minecraft and many customer services. Microsoft said an inadvertent configuration change affecting Azure Front Door/DNS triggered the incident and that engineers rolled back to a “last known good” configuration while recovering nodes and rerouting traffic through healthy nodes. The outage impacted airlines' check‑in and websites (Alaska, Hawaiian), Quebec health‑provider patient tools, Kubernetes Helm downloads and thousands of other Azure‑dependent services, producing large spikes on outage trackers. Microsoft temporarily blocked customer configuration changes, warned recovery would be gradual to avoid overload, and said it expected full restoration by 23:20 UTC (6:20 p.m. ET). The disruption struck hours before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings and followed a major AWS outage a week earlier, underscoring systemic risks from concentrating critical internet infrastructure with a few hyperscalers. Customers were advised to use failover strategies such as Azure Traffic Manager or origin failovers while Microsoft completed restoration and an investigation.