It was a nightmare scenario for the digital age. On Wednesday, just hours before Microsoft was scheduled to release its earnings, its foundational cloud services—Azure and 365—abruptly went offline.
As businesses and users scrambled, they discovered they were not alone: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud provider, was simultaneously grappling with its own devastating service failures.
Users across social media began reporting widespread issues in accessing their websites and services. Even Microsoft's own website became unavailable. According to the user-reported Downdetector, the problems began at approximately 11:40 a.m. ET, sparking a wave of confusion.
Microsoft Scrambles as Azure and 365 Vanish Offline
Microsoft later acknowledged the disruption on its Azure and 365 support accounts on X (formerly Twitter). 'We're investigating an issue impacting several Azure services', the Azure support account stated. 'Customers may experience issues when accessing services. Updates are provided via the Azure status.'.
The company's 365 status account posted a similar message: 'We're investigating reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.'. It added that more information was available under MO1181369 in the Service Health Dashboard.
On its status page, Azure noted a 'loss of availability of some services' starting around 12:00 ET. After investigating, Microsoft identified a 'suspected' culprit.
'We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue', the company updated. 'We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and disabling a problematic route that we found to be related to this, and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.'.
Microsoft said it had taken the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to address access concerns. 'We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update', Microsoft said.
Microsoft Azure and AWS Cloud Services are currently reporting mass outages.
— Vent It (@VentItMedia) October 29, 2025
This is the second time in a week AWS has had a major outage to their services. pic.twitter.com/D2Ae758y0V
Why Amazon's AWS Outage Deepened the Digital Disruption
As Microsoft battled its configuration woes, Amazon was fighting its own fire. AWS reported 'increased latencies for EC2 instance launches' and 'increased ECS task and pod launch failure rates'.
The issues were concentrated in the notoriously problematic use1-az2 Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. This event came just over a week after a previous AWS outage in the same region caused widespread downtime.
The AWS failure impacted a host of dependent services, including Fargate, EMR Serverless, CodeBuild, EKS, Glue, and AWS Batch. As a recovery effort, Amazon temporarily throttled ECS operations in three impacted cells.
The issue was declared 'fully mitigated' at 10:43 PM PDT.
Adding to the day's chaos, CDN operator Cloudflare also reported that it was 'investigating errors that are not allowing users to purchase domains using Social sign in methods'. The simultaneous stumbles of the internet's biggest pillars serve as a stark reminder of the cloud's centralised vulnerabilities.
