Microsoft Outage Knocks Office 365 and Xbox Live Offline for Thousands of Users

Thousands of Microsoft customers across the world were hit by service disruptions on Wednesday after a major outage affected Azure, Office 365, and Xbox Live platforms.

According to Downdetector, Azure — Microsoft’s cloud computing service — was down for more than 105,000 users, while Microsoft 365 recorded nearly 9,000 outage reports. The disruption also affected users trying to access the Azure Portal and the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Microsoft confirmed it was “investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal,” and said the outage was linked to problems with its domain name system.

A company spokesperson told Sky News: “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”

In a post on X, Microsoft 365 Status said: “Microsoft 365 services are experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage.”

The company later identified a “recent configuration change” as the likely cause of the disruption and said it was “pursuing multiple remediation strategies,” including rerouting service traffic and reversing the offending change.

Microsoft also confirmed it had halted the rollout of the configuration update and was working to restore services by reverting affected systems to their previous state.

The outage comes just a week after Amazon’s AWS cloud platform suffered a similar global disruption, which temporarily crippled major online services including Snapchat and Reddit.