Users report outages with Azure and Amazon Web Services leaving services unusable
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- Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
- Inbox: Analyst estimates Microsoft lost $1.2m per hour during Azure outage
- Microsoft outage appears to be over
- Microsoft stock falls in after-hours trading
- Microsoft pushes back recovery time by an hour
- Issue reports taper off as Microsoft says a fix will take effect shortly
- ‘Strong signs’ Microsoft outage could be resolved soon, company says
- Microsoft outage is a reminder of our fragile ‘digital backbone,’ expert says
- Microsoft confirms which of its services have been hit in Azure breakdown
- How to monitor if your cloud provider is down
- Amid outages, how the tech industry can mitigate the risks of relying on outside cloud providers
The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
The Azure outage that touched applications across the web and the global economy on Wednesday appears to be over.
A Microsoft dashboard on Azure’s status showed no active events as of Wednesday evening.
The Independent has contacted the company for further information.
The apparent end comes after the outage caused issues on the website for London’s Heathrow Airport, while Alaska Airlines wrote on X that the outage caused “disruption to key systems, including our websites,” and customers reported lines at the terminal.
Microsoft confirmed the original outage, blaming an “inadvertent configuration change” for the problems.
Customers also reported issues with the Starbucks app and the Costco website, while others claimed difficulties using Microsoft-affiliated products like Office 365, Minecraft and Xbox Live.
Some users on downdetector.com also reported outages with Amazon Web Services, though the tech giant denied any issues with its cloud service.
The Azure outage comes a week after issues on Amazon’s cloud platform impacted numerous companies and apps.
Inbox: Analyst estimates Microsoft lost $1.2m per hour during Azure outage
The Azure outage may have cost Microsoft’s gaming division roughly $1.2 million per hour, according to an analysis from Support My Website, a web support firm.
“This $1.2 million hourly loss is just the damage to Microsoft’s own pocket; it doesn’t even begin to count the massive, uncalculated losses for all the other major brands, from airlines to retailers, that were also brought offline,” Lucas Lopvet, director of support at Support My Website, told The Independent in an email.
Josh Marcus30 October 2025 01:00
Microsoft outage appears to be over
Today’s lengthy Azure outage appears to have finished.
A Microsoft dashboard showing the cloud service’s health was reporting no active incidents as of Wednesday evening.
The same portal previously showed engineers rolling out fixes to patch up the cloud service, as the outage appeared to snare travel sites, consumer apps, and gaming services.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for more information.
Josh Marcus30 October 2025 00:50
Microsoft stock falls in after-hours trading
Throughout the day, Microsoft stock held relatively steady, despite the ongoing Azure outage, with shares falling about one tenth of one percent.
However, in overnight trading, things got worse, and shares fell by about 3.76 percent as of Wednesday evening, according to Yahoo! Finance.
Josh Marcus30 October 2025 00:22
Microsoft pushes back recovery time by an hour
Just when you thought it was over, the Azure outage may last a bit longer than planned.
The company previously estimated that full mitigation of problems on the platform would’ve occurred about half an hour ago.
Now, it has revised that estimate, and the company says it will require about 40 more minutes for its technical fixes to fully take effect.
“We have revised our mitigation time and are currently tracking toward full mitigation by 00:40 UTC on 30 October 2025, though we will communicate if mitigation is achieved sooner,” the Azure status page reads.
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 23:57
Issue reports taper off as Microsoft says a fix will take effect shortly
The Azure outage may be coming to a close.
Users across a variety of applications were reporting far fewer problems throughout Wednesday evening on applications like the Xbox Network, Microsoft 365, Minecraft, and Outlook, according to crowd-sourced data on Downdetector.
The decline in reports could simply be a factor of consumers reporting their issues once then resuming their days, or it could be a sign that the technical fixes Microsoft has been detailing to solve the problem are in fact taking effect.
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 23:42
‘Strong signs’ Microsoft outage could be resolved soon, company says
The Azure outage could soon be over, Microsoft says.
The company suggested in a web post that it’s expecting its technical fixes to kick in fully and mitigate the problem momentarily.
“We are seeing strong signs of improvement across affected regions and are tracking toward full mitigation by 23:20 UTC on 29 October 2025,” the company wrote.
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 23:20
Microsoft outage is a reminder of our fragile ‘digital backbone,’ expert says
The Amazon and Microsoft cloud outages in recent days are a warning sign.
Because so many organizations and companies rely on a handful of giant tech companies for key services like cloud computing, problems within one firm quickly radiate out onto the entire internet, according to Munish Walther-Puri, an adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and the former director of cyber risk for the city of New York.
“Organizations may think they’re insulated by their choice of cloud provider, but dependencies run deeper,” he told WIRED. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages demonstrate the brittleness of our digital backbone.”
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 22:53
Microsoft confirms which of its services have been hit in Azure breakdown
Microsoft has just released an in-depth breakdown on some of the main areas impacted in today’s Azure outage.
Here are the products they flagged: App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel, Video Indexer, and Virtual Desktop.
Users have also reported problems on Microsoft-affiliated platforms like Xbox Live, Minecraft, and Office 365.
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 22:30
How to monitor if your cloud provider is down
Online crowd-sourcing sites and social media can provide early warning about cloud outages, but the most reliable way to track the status of platforms like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS is through official company channels.
You can find the Azure dashboard here, and the AWS one here.
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 22:10
Amid outages, how the tech industry can mitigate the risks of relying on outside cloud providers
Recent cloud outages highlight the vulnerabilities of relying so much on cloud computing – or “the cloud” as it’s often called. But there are ways to mitigate some of the risks.
Here’s a piece from Jongkil Jay Jeong, written after last week’s Amazon outage, on what can be done.
Josh Marcus29 October 2025 21:50
