Azure outage: What is Microsoft Azure? Global outage hits world’s second-largest cloud platform ahead of quarterly earnings

Microsoft Azure Microsoft experienced a major disruption to its cloud and productivity services with outages impacting the Azure portal and Microsoft 365 apps just hours before the company was scheduled to report quarterly results. The interruption affected thousands of customers worldwide and knocked out access to multiple consumer and enterprise services running on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. User reports began to spike on outage tracker DownDetector; by midday, the company’s own status pages acknowledged the issue. “Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and, at the same time, rolling back to our last known good state.”What is Azure?Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a vast global network of data centers that allows organizations to build, run, and manage applications without maintaining their own physical infrastructure. With more than 200 products and services, it competes directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.Live EventsAzure provides the backbone for critical systems in banking, healthcare, travel, government, and entertainment. On any given day, it handles millions of virtual machines, database queries, and AI computations. When it fails, the ripple effects are immediate and global.Core services and capabilitiesComputing: Azure offers virtual machines, serverless options such as Azure Functions, and managed Kubernetes services to host and scale applications efficiently.Storage and Databases: It provides everything from standard disk and file storage to archival options and advanced databases, including Azure SQL and NoSQL platforms like Cosmos DB.Networking: Azure delivers tools for virtual networking, load balancing, and content delivery, essential for managing data flow and keeping applications online.Analytics and AI: A growing segment of Azure is devoted to AI and machine learning, powering data analytics, model training, and even large language model (LLM) deployments used in Microsoft Copilot and other intelligent applications.Security and Governance: The platform integrates encryption, identity management, and compliance monitoring. Microsoft employs a 24/7 global security team to detect and mitigate threats.Hybrid and Edge: Azure allows organizations to extend its capabilities beyond the cloud, connecting on-premises servers and edge devices to the same management ecosystem.Developer Tools: Developers rely on Azure’s deep integration with GitHub, Visual Studio, and Azure DevOps to build, test, and deploy software at scale.The disruption cascaded across industries. Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines reported system outages linked to Azure, advising passengers to check in manually at airports. Starbucks, Costco, and several UK internet providers also reported intermittent service failures.The Azure support page noted that Microsoft has not yet provided an estimated time for completing the rollback of the configuration change believed to have triggered the outage.Add as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now! (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel) Read More News onAzure outageMicrosoft Azurecloud computingMicrosoft 365Azure servicesAzure Front DoorAWS outageMicrosoftAzure supportglobal outage (Catch all the US News, UK News, Canada News, International Breaking News Events, and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily International News Updates....moreless (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel)Read More News onAzure outageMicrosoft Azurecloud computingMicrosoft 365Azure servicesAzure Front DoorAWS outageMicrosoftAzure supportglobal outage(Catch all the US News, UK News, Canada News, International Breaking News Events, and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily International News Updates....moreless Explore More Stories123