Microsoft Azure and AWS Outages Affect Thousands of Users

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft Azure services and Amazon‘s AWS platform experienced significant outages on Wednesday,October 29, affecting thousands of users across various applications.

The outage began just before noon EDT and lasted over an hour, with nearly 18,000 users reporting issues on Downdetector, a site that tracks service disruptions. Among the affected services were Xbox, Microsoft 365, and popular games including Minecraft.

“Azure is down and all Microsoft services have gone down as well,” one user commented on Downdetector. “This affects also the 20% of websites and tools that use Azure.” Users from several countries, including Peru, expressed frustration over the outages, with one posting, “aws vs azure who can take down more of the internet.”

Downdetector reported that 59% of users faced problems accessing Microsoft’s website, while 29% had server connection issues. Around 12% reported difficulties related to domain access on Azure servers.

Microsoft acknowledged the issues on its status page, stating, “We’re investigating reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.” They further indicated that traffic was being rerouted as they sought to resolve the outage.

The company specified that the outage resulted in a loss of availability for some services, noting, “Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues.” They recommended using programmatic methods like PowerShell for those unable to access services directly.

Microsoft confirmed they were assessing alternative solutions to address the ongoing problems and assured more updates would follow within the hour.