The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures

Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform, it is widely used 365 Services, XboxAnd Minecraft The outage began around noon EST on Wednesday, resulting in Microsoft Said “an inadvertent configuration change.” The incident — which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks — highlights the volatility of an Internet built on infrastructure operated by a handful of tech giants.

Microsoft’s problems stemmed specifically from Azure’s front-door content delivery network and emerged hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings announcement. The company’s website, including its investor relations page, was still down Wednesday afternoon, and Azure status page There were also occasional problems where Microsoft delivered updates.

Microsoft described in a status update Wednesday that it went through the process of rolling back the latest versions of its environment incrementally until it identified the “last known good” configuration. At 3:01 pm ET, the company said it had identified and pushed this stable configuration and “customers may begin to see early signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”

“We are working to resolve an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is affecting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their service health alerts,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. The company did not immediately respond to WIRED’s questions about the nature of the configuration changes that caused the outage.

In addition to occurring on Microsoft’s earnings day, the outage comes nine days after Azure rival Amazon Web Services was hit. mass outage that Affected Sites and Services Major cloud providers around the world, often referred to as “hyperscalers,” standardize and often improve baseline security and reliability for their customers, but problems and outages can become a single point of failure for a large population of critical digital services.

“Even Azure’s outage status page is down,” said Davey Ottenheimer, longtime security operations and compliance manager and vice president at data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Another configuration change error – we are now in an era of more integrity violations than ever before.”

Azure blocked customers from making configuration changes to their instances while it worked to fix the issue. The company said in a status update at 3:22 pm ET that it expects “full mitigation” of the situation by 7:20 pm ET.

“Organizations may think they are insulated by their cloud provider of choice, but the dependency runs deeper,” said Munish Walther-Puri, a faculty member at IANS Research and former director of cyber risk in New York City. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, the exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages demonstrate the fragility of our digital backbone.”