Microsoft experienced a widespread service outage on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, affecting its Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 suite, leaving thousands of users unable to access critical business services.
The disruption, which began around 16:00 UTC (approximately 9:30 PM IST), was attributed to Domain Name System (DNS) configuration issues that crippled connectivity across Microsoft’s global infrastructure.
The outage impacted a broad spectrum of Microsoft products and services, with tens of thousands of users reporting difficulties accessing essential platforms.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector, Azure logged over 16,600 user reports, while Microsoft 365 accumulated nearly 9,000 complaints during the incident’s peak.
Users worldwide experienced problems accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center, Azure Portal, Exchange admin center, and Microsoft Intune functions.
Additionally, the disruption extended beyond enterprise services to affect consumer platforms, including Xbox Live, Minecraft, Microsoft Copilot, and Outlook add-ins.
The DNS issue prevented users from authenticating into corporate networks and accessing cloud-based business platforms, creating significant operational challenges for organizations globally.
Even Microsoft’s own service status pages temporarily went offline during the early stages of the disruption, leaving customers unable to monitor recovery progress.
Healthcare organizations, the Dutch railway system’s travel planning platforms, and businesses across multiple sectors reported authentication failures that disrupted daily operations.
Mitigation Efforts
Microsoft confirmed the issue stemmed from DNS problems affecting its internal infrastructure, with officials later attributing the outage to an inadvertent Azure Front Door configuration change.
In updates posted to the Azure status page, the company stated it was “reviewing network and hosting infrastructure health to determine why the service is in an unhealthy state”.
As part of its mitigation strategy, Microsoft began rerouting affected traffic to alternate healthy infrastructure while blocking all changes to Azure Front Door services and rolling back to the last known good configuration.
The company advised customers experiencing portal access difficulties to use programmatic methods such as PowerShell or CLI to access Azure resources as a temporary workaround.
Microsoft’s engineering teams implemented concurrent recovery actions, including assessing failover options for internal services running on the Azure Front Door infrastructure.
As of the latest update at approximately 10:06 PM IST, Microsoft reported that traffic rerouting efforts were underway, though investigations into the root cause remained ongoing.
This incident underscores the critical dependencies modern businesses have on cloud infrastructure providers and highlights the cascading effects that DNS-level failures can trigger across interconnected digital services worldwide.
