On Wednesday, just hours before Microsoft was scheduled to release its quarterly earnings, its Azure cloud services and 365 productivity suite experienced an unexpected outage.

Users on social media reported being unable to access their own websites and services hosted on Microsoft’s platforms, while several Microsoft-owned websites—including the Xbox homepage and investor relations page—also went down. According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks outages based on user reports, the issues began around 11:40 AM Eastern Time.

A Microsoft spokesperson stated in an email: "We are working to resolve an issue affecting Azure Front Door, which has caused reduced availability for some services. Customers should monitor the Service Health alerts for updates, and further details can be found on the Azure status page."

Microsoft’s Azure support account on X posted: "We are investigating an issue impacting multiple Azure services," adding that "customers may experience difficulties accessing services."

The latest update on Azure’s status page indicated that the problem originated from Azure Front Door (AFD) around noon Eastern Time, causing "latency, timeouts, or errors" for users relying on the service. Microsoft stated that the root cause was likely "an unexpected configuration change" and that it was rolling AFD back to a "previously confirmed stable state."

The company noted: "As the rollback progresses, customers should begin to see early signs of recovery. Once deployment is complete, we will restore nodes and reroute traffic through healthy instances."

Meanwhile, Microsoft 365’s status account confirmed that its services were "experiencing downstream impact from the ongoing Azure outage."

This disruption occurred just over a week after Microsoft’s key competitor, Amazon Web Services (AWS), suffered a major outage that took down numerous websites. On October 20, AWS reported "elevated error rates" when users attempted to launch new instances of its popular EC2 cloud service.

According to Canalys, as of Q1 2025, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market with a 32% share, followed by Microsoft Azure at 23%, and Google Cloud at 10%. Recently, surging demand for AI workloads has driven faster growth for Azure and Google Cloud compared to AWS.

All three cloud giants are set to report quarterly earnings this week: Microsoft and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) will announce results after Wednesday’s market close, while Amazon will release its report on Thursday.

Alaska Airlines stated Wednesday afternoon that its "critical systems, including the company website, are experiencing disruptions due to the Azure outage," noting that "multiple services for Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines are hosted on Azure." Last year, Alaska Airlines completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines.

In March, Microsoft experienced another weekend outage that left tens of thousands of users unable to access Outlook and related applications.