A massive Microsoft Azure outage is taking down Xbox and 365

Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, is experiencing an outage just one week after issues with AWS took out swaths of the internet. The issues have impacted Microsoft’s services that run on Azure, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and even Minecraft. Other companies, like Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Starbucks, also had outages that were linked to the problems with Azure.

On Azure’s status page, Microsoft’s messages have linked the outage to an “inadvertent configuration change” and DNS problem. At around 3:20PM ET, the company said it had finished deploying its “last known good” configuration and says customers should soon start seeing signs of recovery, with “full mitigation” expected in the next four hours.

As Microsoft reported its earnings at 4PM ET, its main website continued to load slowly, and the outage is not yet resolved.

At 12:25PM ET, Microsoft 365’s status account on X said the company is investigating reports of “issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.” A Microsoft 365 update posted at 1:02PM ET said the company “identified portions of internal infrastructure that are experiencing connectivity issues,” and that it’s working to “reroute affected traffic to restore service health.” Meanwhile, Xbox’s status page still isn’t even loading.

The outage goes beyond Microsoft’s services, as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines say they are “currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites” due to issues with Azure. The airlines advise customers to see an agent at the airport to get their boarding pass if they can’t check in for their flight online.

Community Fibre, an internet provider in the UK, similarly confirmed that some customers may be experiencing issues due to the Microsoft outage. Additionally, Kroger told customers that its site and mobile apps were “experiencing an unexpected outage,” while Starbucks’ and Costco’s websites weren’t loading, and users are reporting issues with Capital One.

Reports of issues with Azure began spiking on DownDetector at around 12PM ET, coinciding with reports of an outage across Microsoft 365 and Xbox.

Update, October 29th: Added details on recovery.