In the middle of Microsoft’s busy earnings day on 29 October 2025, the company’s Azure cloud service suffered a major outage that rippled around the world. Microsoft later said the disruption was caused by an inadvertent configuration change that broke its Azure Front Door (AFD) content‑delivery network.
This single mistake triggered a cascade of problems that knocked out popular services like Microsoft 365, Xbox Live and even mobile apps for Starbucks and Costco. The incident, which lasted for hours, highlighted just how dependent modern businesses are on cloud platforms and how easily those platforms can fail.
When did the outage start?
The trouble began in the late afternoon for European users and mid‑morning for Americans. Microsoft’s status page said that starting around 16:00 UTC (9 a.m. Pacific) on 29 October, customers using Azure Front Door “may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors”. Cisco’s ThousandEyes monitoring service noticed similar problems at around 15:45 UTC, observing global HTTP timeouts and elevated packet loss at the edge of Microsoft’s network. In other
