After AWS, Microsoft Faces Wide Azure Outage Before Earnings
Downdetector flags problems across Databricks Maps and Virtual Desktop hours ahead of results.
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[Image creative: Chetan Jha/MITSMR India]
Days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) was hit by an outage that disrupted Reddit, Snapchat, Duolingo, and Zoom, cloud rival Microsoft saw a similar fate hours before releasing its quarterly earnings.
The AWS disruption is estimated to have caused losses up to $581 million, according to CyberCube.
Downdetector, based on user complaints, reported that problems accessing sites and services running on Microsoft products began at 9.40pm IST on Wednesday, 29 October.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services. Customers may experience issues when accessing services,” Azure Support posted on X shortly after. Over a dozen Azure services were hit, including Azure Databricks, Azure Maps, and Azure Virtual Desktop.
Azure customers such as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines said they were “currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites” on X at 11.03 pm IST.
“We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change (was) the trigger event for this issue,” Microsoft said in a statement updated at 11.40 pm IST.
The major outage, however, did not dent the company’s financial outlook. Microsoft posted stronger-than-expected results, with revenue up 18% to $77.7 billion versus $77.5 billion expected, riding the demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
“Our planet-scale cloud and AI factory, together with Copilots across high-value domains, is driving broad diffusion and real-world impact,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive officer. “It’s why we continue to increase our investments in AI across both capital and talent to meet the massive opportunity ahead.”
“We delivered a strong start to the fiscal year, exceeding expectations across revenue, operating income, and earnings per share,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. “Continued strength in the Microsoft Cloud reflects the growing customer demand for our differentiated platform.”
In March this year, a separate Microsoft outage locked tens of thousands of users out of Outlook and other programs. Downdetector said more than 37,000 individuals reported an Outlook outage, roughly 24,000 flagged issues with Microsoft 365, and about 150 reported Teams was down.
The AWS outage remains the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction, when a faulty update caused widespread problems on Microsoft Windows machines running the software, crashing roughly 8.5 million systems and preventing proper restarts.
