Microsoft Azure outage disrupts Xbox and Microsoft 365

Microsoft Azure encountered a major outage beginning around 16:00 UTC that disrupted the Xbox platform, Minecraft, and web-based Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft says Azure Front Door configuration changes appear to be the trigger and engineers are rolling back to a last known good state.

Microsoft Azure is experiencing a major outage that began at approximately 16:00 UTC and affected a broad set of Microsoft services and some third-party customers. The disruption hit the entire Xbox platform and Minecraft, and caused outages across the Microsoft 365 web suite, including Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Defender, OneDrive, Designer, Clipchamp, and SharePoint. The article describes this as Microsoft’s first major Azure outage in some time, with several services rendered partially or completely unavailable during the incident.

In its incident communication, Microsoft identified Azure Front Door, commonly abbreviated AFD, as the component experiencing issues and said it suspects an inadvertent configuration change triggered the outage. Microsoft outlined concurrent mitigation steps: it blocked all changes to AFD services, including customer configuration changes, and began rolling back the AFD configuration to a last known good state. Microsoft emphasized that the rollback is being managed carefully to prevent the problematic configuration from reappearing as services recover. The company did not provide an estimated time of completion, and said it would update the status within 30 minutes or when new information was available. The status message was last updated at 17:40 UTC on 29 October 2025.

As of the article’s latest testing, Microsoft had restored the Microsoft 365 services, while some third-party services that rely on Azure Networking infrastructure remained impacted. The outage affected both first-party Microsoft offerings and third-party companies that depend on Azure networking and routing. The article notes ongoing recovery efforts focused on rollback and prevention of recurrence, and it reports that Microsoft is continuing to communicate updates through its incident channel as engineers work to fully restore affected services.

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