Microsoft says it’s recovering after Azure outage took down 365, Xbox, and Starbucks

Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, has experienced an outage just one week after issues with AWS took out swaths of the internet. The issues 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. As Microsoft reported its earnings on Wednesday afternoon, its main website continued to load slowly as the outage dragged on.

An update on Microsoft’s status page at 7:40PM ET included this information:

Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC on 29 October 2025, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors. We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue.

Affected Azure services may have included, but were not limited to:

App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Azure Virtual Desktop, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID (Mobility Management Policy Service, Identity & Access Management, and User Management UX), Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel (Threat Intelligence), and Video Indexer.

The AFD service is now operating above 98% availability. While the majority of customers and services are mitigated or seeing strong improvement across affected regions, we are continuing to work on tail-end recovery for remaining impacted customers and services. We have revised our mitigation time and are currently tracking toward full mitigation by 00:40 UTC on 30 October 2025, though we will communicate if mitigation is achieved sooner.

The Xbox Support X account also says that gaming services have recovered to their pre-incident state; however, some players said they needed to restart their consoles to reconnect.

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 wasn’t loading, but that has since come back online.

The outage stretched beyond Microsoft’s services, as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines said they were “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 couldn’t check in online.

Community Fibre, an internet provider in the UK, similarly confirmed that some customers may have experienced 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 and apps weren’t loading, and users reported issues with Capital One.

A global outage impacted the Microsoft Azure platform today where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted, causing a disruption to key systems, including our websites.Our teams worked quickly to stand up our backup infrastructure to allow our guests to book and…— Alaska Airlines News (@AlaskaAirNews) October 29, 2025

Our configuration deployment and traffic rebalancing is showing steady service health improvement for the various affected M365 services. Some users may experience residual impact until availability fully recovers. We’re monitoring for an extended period to ensure service health…— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) October 29, 2025

All Xbox Services have recovered to their pre-incident state. Thank you for your patience while we addressed this issue.— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) October 29, 2025

Update, October 29th: Added details on recovery.