Microsoft Restores Azure After Massive Global Outage Disrupts Airlines, Websites

Microsoft Restores Azure Services After Hours-Long Global Outage

Microsoft restores Azure after an 8-hour global outage hits airlines, websites, and cloud services worldwide.

Microsoft has restored most of its Azure cloud services after a major global outage disrupted operations for thousands of businesses and websites on Wednesday. The company confirmed that while most systems have returned to normal performance levels, a small number of customers are still experiencing residual issues as teams work to resolve lingering problems.

The outage, which lasted more than eight hours, caused widespread disruption across industries. Alaska Airlines reported interruptions to key systems, including its website, while Heathrow Airport and Vodafone also faced connectivity problems earlier in the day. Azure Communication Services and Media Services were among those directly affected.

Microsoft attributed the incident to an Azure configuration change that impacted its global content delivery network, Azure Front Door. The company said error rates and latency had returned to “pre-incident levels” by late Wednesday.

Outage tracker Downdetector recorded over 18,000 reports of Azure-related issues at the height of the disruption, which later fell to just a few hundred by evening. Microsoft 365 services, which were hit by downstream effects of the outage, also saw reports drop sharply from a peak of nearly 20,000 users.

The event followed a similar large-scale outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week that disrupted major apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Both incidents underscore the increasing fragility of global internet infrastructure, heavily reliant on a handful of major cloud providers.