Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

Azure Front Door service outage disrupts airlines and other online services

Microsoft Azure has been experiencing a global outage since around 1600 UTC, or 0900 PDT on Wednesday, October 29, 2025.

The company expects that services will be fully restored by 23:20 UTC, or about 16:20 PDT this afternoon.

The outage is occurring somewhat inconveniently as Microsoft reports its FY26 Q1 earnings, during which revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 40% from a year ago, making it the fastest-growing business segment that Redmond breaks out during its quarterly check-in with investors.

The Microsoft Azure Status Page indicates that the problem affects Microsoft services tied to Azure Front Door, Microsoft's content delivery network.

Alaska Airlines in a statement on its website said that both Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines "are currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites," due to their reliance on the Microsoft Azure platform.

"For our guests who are unable to check-in online due to the Microsoft Azure outage, please see an agent at the airport for a boarding pass, and allow for some extra time in the lobby," the airline said. "We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we navigate this issue."

Kubernetes management application Helm was also affected – the company's get.helm.sh page returned a "ResourceNotFound" error at the time this story was filed.

Santé Québec, a health provider in Quebec, Canada, reportedly suspended some of its patient access tools due to Azure's troubles.

There are also reports of disruptions to Microsoft services that rely on Azure, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and Xbox Live.

According to Microsoft, "Affected Azure services include, but are not limited to: 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, and Virtual Desktop."

It's been a bad week for cloud services. AWS only a few hours ago resolved issues affecting its US-EAST-1 region, which suffered a major outage last week.

Rohit Chopra, a former FTC Commissioner and a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a social media post, said the recent AWS and Azure outages have created chaos in the business community.

"We need to accept that the extreme concentration in cloud services isn't just an inconvenience, it's a real vulnerability," he said.

Microsoft says it has reverted to its "last known good" configuration and some customers are seeing services improve. The company said it is blocking customer configuration changes temporarily while it continues mitigation efforts.

That said, the company suggests customers may wish to redirect traffic from Azure Front Door to their own servers via Azure Traffic Manager as a temporary failover strategy. ®