Microsoft Says ‘Problematic Configuration Change’ Caused Outage of Cloud Services

Microsoft said Wednesday (Oct. 29) that it is working on issues that have been causing service degradation on Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) productivity apps and Microsoft Azure cloud computing services.

On Microsoft 365, users may encounter issues when trying to access some services and portals, the company said in an update posted at 9:30 p.m. UTC on its Service Health Status page.

The company said it is investigating the issues and that any users attempting to access Microsoft 365 services may be impacted by those issues. It said the preliminary root cause of the issues is that a “problematic configuration change was applied to a portion of Azure infrastructure.”

“We’ve completed the deployment of the previously healthy configuration and are actively rebalancing traffic across healthy infrastructure to actualize recovery across the affected services,” the update said.

On Microsoft Azure, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door may have been experiencing issues beginning Wednesday around 16:00 UTC, the company said in an update posted at 7:57 p.m. UTC on the same Service Health Status Page.

Azure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network service, according to a description in Google search results. The Azure Front Door website was down Wednesday.

Microsoft said in the update that it confirmed that “an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue.”

“We initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration, which has now successfully been completed,” the update said. “Customers may have begun to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes, and as we make progress in this workstream, customers will continue to see improvement.”

Microsoft expects recovery to happen by 23:20 UTC on Wednesday, per the update.

In a reply to a post on X that asked by Outlook is down, the Microsoft Support account said the company was aware of the outage affecting Microsoft websites.

“Rest assured, an internal ticket has already been created, and our support engineers are actively working on a fix. This issue is being treated as a top priority, and we expect updates soon,” Microsoft Support said.

In a reply to a post about the Microsoft Store and sites being down or very slow, the Microsoft Support account said those issues had been reported and are being worked on by its engineers.

“There’s no turnaround time yet, but they are hoping to have it fixed the soonest time possible,” Microsoft Support said.

In an earlier, separate incident, Amazon Web Services said on Oct. 20 that it fixed a massive outage of its services that had impacted millions of people and large portions of the internet around the world.