Microsoft Azure, one of the world’s leading cloud computing platforms, experienced a significant service outage on Thursday, October 9, 2025, leaving customers across Europe and Africa unable to access their services.
The disruption began at approximately 07:40 UTC, with the core issue identified as a major capacity loss within Azure Front Door (AFD), Microsoft’s cloud-native Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Users reported periodic connectivity problems, which extended to an inability to access the Azure Portal itself, preventing administrators from managing their own cloud infrastructure.
The incident highlights the critical dependency of global businesses on cloud service availability and the cascading impact of a failure in a core component like a CDN.
According to Microsoft’s service health status page, internal monitoring systems detected a “significant capacity loss, of about 30% of Azure Front Door instances.” This degradation was predominantly concentrated across environments in Europe and Africa.
Specific regions confirmed to be impacted include North Europe, West Europe, France Central, South Africa West, and South Africa North.
Azure Front Door is designed to provide a secure and scalable entry point for web applications, accelerating content delivery and enhancing global performance.
Its failure effectively cut off the “front door” for many services, rendering them inaccessible to end-users even if the backend infrastructure remained operational.
Microsoft promptly acknowledged the incident through its official channels. The Azure Support team on X (formerly Twitter) confirmed an “ongoing outage” and stated that their engineering teams were actively working toward a resolution.
In a more detailed impact statement, the company noted it was investigating the underlying factors that may have triggered the sudden capacity loss.
As of 10:14 UTC, Microsoft had ruled out any recent deployments as a potential cause for the event, suggesting the root cause may be more complex.
The company promised to provide further updates within 60 minutes or as the situation evolved, while also engaging with affected customers directly via direct messages to gather specific subscription details for better assistance.
Users Express Frustration Online
The outage triggered a swift reaction from the global developer and IT community, with many taking to social media to report the issues and express their frustration.
The inability to access not just their public-facing services but also the Azure Portal itself was a significant point of concern, as it left administrators in the dark and unable to implement potential workarounds.
The event serves as a centralized cloud infrastructure, where a single point of failure in a critical service like a CDN can lead to widespread and costly downtime for countless organizations that rely on it for their daily operations.
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