The Microsoft Azure shutdown shows the harsh reality of cloud failures
Microsoft Azure cloud The platform, popular 365 services, Xbox and Minecraft were disrupted around noon EST Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was an “unintended configuration change.” The incident, which marks the second outage of a major cloud provider in less than two weeks, highlights the instability of an Internet largely built on the infrastructure of a few tech giants.
Microsoft’s problems stem specifically from Azure’s Front Door content delivery network and appear hours before Microsoft’s scheduled earnings announcement. The company’s website, including its investor relations page, was still down Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page, where Microsoft provides updates, also had intermittent problems.
In Wednesday’s status updates, Microsoft explained that it has been rolling back successively recent versions of its environment to determine the “last known good” configuration. At 3:01 PM ET, the company said it had identified and applied the stable configuration and that “customers may see early signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement: “We are investigating an issue affecting the Azure gateway and affecting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their service health alerts.” The company did not immediately respond to WIRED’s questions about the nature of the configuration change that caused the outage.
In addition to happening on Microsoft’s earnings day, the outage comes nine days after Amazon Web Services’ rival Azure suffered a massive outage that affected sites and services around the world. Big cloud providers, often called “hyperscalers,” standardize and often improve basic security and reliability for their customers, but problems and outages can make them a single point of contact for a large population of critical digital services.
“Even Azure’s outage status page is broken,” says Davey Ottenheimer, longtime director of security and compliance operations and vice president of data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Another misconfiguration error – now more than ever we’re in the age of integrity violations.”
Azure blocked customers from making configuration changes to their instances while it worked to fix the problem. In a status update at 3:22 p.m. ET, the company said it expected a “full reduction” by 7:20 p.m. ET.
“Organizations may think they are insulated by choosing a cloud provider, but the dependencies run deeper,” says Monish Walter-Puri, a faculty member at IANS Research and former director of cyber risk for New York City. Exposure is multiplied when key partners rely on other cloud scalers. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages reveal the fragility of our digital backbone.
