Microsoft is facing a major cloud outage as its Azure platform went down globally on Wednesday, affecting key services like Microsoft 365, Xbox, and even Minecraft. The outage began around 12 PM ET (9:30 PM IST) and quickly spread across regions, leaving millions of users unable to access essential services.
According to Microsoft’s official Azure status page, the issue began with a problem in Azure Front Door, the company’s global content delivery network that handles traffic routing and load balancing. Microsoft confirmed:
Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. In addition. customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation.
The company also noted that users who cannot access the Azure Portal can try using PowerShell, CLI, or other programmatic methods to manage their resources.
The outage has caused widespread disruption to Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. The official Microsoft 365 account on X (formerly Twitter) confirmed that the company is investigating reports of login failures and admin center access issues.
Meanwhile, Xbox services have also been hit hard. Many gamers reported that the Xbox status page isn’t even loading, and users are unable to access their online profiles or play cloud-based games. Reports on DownDetector surged around noon ET, showing issues across both Xbox Live and Microsoft 365, with complaints pouring in from users in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.
The outage comes just hours before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings announcement. The company was expected to highlight strong performance in its cloud computing division, but the timing of this disruption has drawn attention to the reliability of its infrastructure, especially after Amazon Web Services (AWS) also suffered a massive outage just last week.
This latest incident raises new questions about the stability of major cloud providers, as businesses, governments, and entertainment platforms depend heavily on them. Azure powers not only Microsoft’s own services but also thousands of third-party applications and websites.
Microsoft’s latest update says engineers are still investigating contributing factors and are working to restore normal operations as soon as possible. The company has promised to provide more information within 60 minutes or sooner.
Based on current reports, the outage appears to have a global reach, with affected users in multiple regions unable to log in to Azure, Xbox, or Microsoft 365. Some enterprise users have reported that even cloud-based authentication and security services are running slowly or not responding.
This is not the first time Azure has gone down, but the scale of this disruption highlights just how dependent modern computing has become on centralized cloud infrastructure. When a service like Azure fails, the impact ripples across gaming, business, communication, and government systems almost instantly.
