Microsoft Azure, 365 Copilot outage blamed on configuration error, impacting thousands of users
The Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform and the Microsoft 365 Copilot productivity software suite were down for thousands of users on Wednesday, with the tech giant reporting that a configuration error was to blame.
In its latest status update at 5:12 p.m. ET, Microsoft Azure is blaming the outages on a configuration change gone awry.
"Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC on 29th October 2025, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door (AFD) may experience latencies, timeouts, and errors. We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue," it said.
Microsoft said it has since "initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration, which has now successfully completed. We are currently recovering nodes and re-routing traffic through healthy nodes."
The recovery progress, which Microsoft says will be gradual, is expected to be completed sometime around 7:30 p.m. ET.
The outage began just after 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday according to the internet monitoring site Downdetector.com.
Alaska Airlines said on Wednesday it was experiencing a disruption to key systems because of the outage, including its website, along with Vodafone in the UK and Heathrow Airport, Reuters said.
And according to reports by Bleeping Computer, the “ongoing DNS outage” had impacted “Microsoft customers worldwide, including the Dutch railway system” and several large healthcare providers.
Over a dozen Azure services have been affected intermittently throughout the day, including:
- App Service
- Azure Active Directory B2C
- Azure Communication Services
- Azure Databricks
- Azure Healthcare APIs
- Azure Maps
- Azure Portal
- Azure SQL Database
- Container Registry
- Media Services
- Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Microsoft Purview
- Microsoft Sentinel
- Video Indexer
- Virtual Desktop
At its peak around 12:00 p.m., Downdetector showed over 20,000 users had issues connecting to the Azure platform, while Copilot showed about 11,500 users with problems.
“Microsoft 365 services are experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage,“ Microsoft 365's status page also said in a series of statements on the outages on X.
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“We're closely monitoring the environment to ensure the reversion has taken effect and that all infrastructure returns to a healthy state,“ it said in its most recent update.
Microsoft 365 added it was “manually rebalancing service traffic across the environment” to help in recovery efforts, and that users can expect disruptions as the “recovery workstreams are ongoing.”
We're closely monitoring the environment to ensure the reversion has taken effect and that all infrastructure returns to a healthy state. In parallel, we're working to manually rebalance service traffic across the environment to achieve withstanding recovery. Users may continue…
undefined Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) October 29, 2025
Roughly 58% of Azure customers reported issues with the website, with another 29% having problems with the server connection, and 12% said their issues were with the Azure domain itself.
Over half of Copilot users reported issues connecting to the M365 Administration center, another 30% to the website, and 19% had problems logging in.
Last week, Amazon's cloud service AWS experienced its own major outage, caused by a DNS server failure at its Northern Virginia data center.
The outage, impacting over a thousand companies worldwide, disrupted multitude of services, including Signal, Snapchat, Amazon, Ring, Reddit, and many others.
