Microsoft Azure Outage Disrupts Microsoft 365, Xbox, and Minecraft Services Globally
Microsoft's Azure cloud platform suffered a massive outage on Wednesday, impacting thousands of users of Microsoft 365, Xbox, and other services globally.
October 29, 2025 - 03:33 PM ET • 3 min read
Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform experienced a widespread outage on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, causing significant disruption to thousands of users attempting to access core Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, and the popular video game Minecraft.
The disruption began around 12:00 PM Eastern Time (16:00 UTC). Tracking services reported that the outage affected more than 105,000 Azure users, with nearly 9,000 users also reporting issues with Microsoft 365.
Microsoft officials confirmed that the root of the problem was localized in the Azure infrastructure, specifically impacting services that leverage Azure Front Door (AFD).
The company stated that it suspected an "inadvertent configuration change" was the trigger event for the widespread issues. This configuration change led to latencies, timeouts, and errors across various dependent services. Microsoft also noted that issues with its domain name system (DNS) were contributing to the problems.
In response to the incident, Microsoft announced it was taking concurrent actions to mitigate the outage. These actions included blocking all further changes to the AFD services and simultaneously initiating a rollback of the suspected configuration change. However, the company did not immediately provide an estimated time of resolution (ETA) for when the rollback would be complete.
A spokesperson told reporters that the company was "working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services." Customers were advised to monitor the Azure status page and their Service Health Alerts for the latest updates.
The failure of the Azure platform resulted in a cascade effect, rendering several crucial Microsoft products inaccessible or unstable for users worldwide.
The Microsoft 365 admin center was among the affected services, with the Microsoft 365 Status account confirming on social media that its services were experiencing "downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage." Users of Office 365 reported being unable to access the portal and related applications.
The outage also severely impacted Microsoft's gaming ecosystem. Reports of connection issues and service failures escalated dramatically for users of Xbox Live and the popular sandbox game Minecraft. Since Minecraft relies on Microsoft's infrastructure for server access and account verification, it became one of the most visible consumer victims of the cloud failure.
Furthermore, the Azure management portal itself was producing error messages when subscribers and visitors attempted to load it, complicating efforts for customers to manage their cloud resources.
The timing of the outage occurred just ahead of Microsoft's scheduled quarterly earnings report, adding pressure to the technology firm to resolve the infrastructure issues quickly. The incident follows a similar massive cloud disruption experienced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) just one week prior, highlighting the fragility of internet services dependent on major cloud providers.