Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is currently experiencing a widespread global outage, affecting a range of major online services, including Microsoft 365, Outlook, the Microsoft Store, and the Xbox Network. The disruption, which began at approximately 16:00 UTC on October 29, 2025, has caused partial or complete accessibility issues for millions of users across multiple regions.
According to Microsoft’s official incident update, the issue stems from a failure in the Azure Front Door (AFD) infrastructure, which serves as one of the company’s primary content delivery and routing systems. The outage has impacted user access to the Azure Portal, preventing many customers from managing or monitoring their cloud services. Microsoft stated that while the portal remains inaccessible for many users, programmatic methods such as PowerShell and the Azure CLI may still function as temporary alternatives for resource management.
“Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services,” Microsoft explained in its statement. “Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation.” The company further noted that its engineering teams are actively investigating failover options and evaluating the contributing factors that led to the service disruption. A subsequent update is expected within the next hour.
The outage has had ripple effects across Microsoft’s ecosystem. Users are reporting difficulties accessing key services such as Microsoft 365 and Outlook, while connectivity issues have also been noted on Xbox Live and the Microsoft Store. Game-related services, particularly those reliant on Azure infrastructure, have also encountered interruptions.
The official Forza Motorsport account confirmed that Forza.net is currently affected by the outage, though multiplayer functionality for Forza Horizon 5 and Forza Motorsport remains operational. “Forza.net is experiencing some interruptions as part of a larger Azure services issue,” the team wrote. “Please note that access to multiplayer features in Forza Horizon 5 and Forza Motorsport on PC and console are unaffected by this outage.”
Although Microsoft has not revealed the complete details or specific cause of the outage, this incident highlights the reliance of both enterprise and consumer services on the Azure platform. Azure not only supports Microsoft’s own applications but also powers thousands of third-party products worldwide.
As of the latest update at 17:04 UTC, Microsoft engineers continue to work on mitigation efforts to restore full functionality across affected services. The company has pledged to provide further details as they become available, with the next official communication expected within the next hour.
This ongoing disruption serves as one of the most significant cloud service interruptions in recent months, following an outage with Amazon AWS services earlier.
