On Wednesday, October 29, 2025, Microsoft experienced a significant cloud service outage that disrupted critical platforms, including its foundational Azure cloud service and the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. The disruption, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET (approximately 16:00 UTC), was particularly ill-timed, occurring just hours before the company was scheduled to release its quarterly earnings report. The Cause: DNS and Front Door Issues Initial reports quickly identified the technical root of the widespread problems: DNS Outage: The incident was linked to an ongoing DNS (Domain Name System) issue. Azure Front Door: Microsoft confirmed on its status page that the problems were also related to "Azure Front Door issues," which resulted in a "loss of availability of some services". Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry-point that uses the Microsoft global edge network to create fast, secure, and widely scalable web applications. Widespread Impact: From Gaming to the Corporate Office The dependency of many Microsoft services on the Azure infrastructure meant the outage had a massive ripple effect, impacting a broad range of users: Corporate & IT: Users were unable to access the Azure Portal, which is essential for managing cloud resources. There were also problems accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center. Productivity: Core services within the Microsoft 365 suite were affected. Gaming: Popular consumer services like Xbox and the game Minecraft were also taken down by the massive server outage. The sheer scale of the disruption was highlighted by the fact that Microsoft's server outage was so severe that it even "taking down the status pages people use to track the outages". A Critical Time for Disruption The timing of the service disruption compounded the severity of the event. The outage occurred ahead of Microsoft's quarterly earnings report, drawing significant media attention to the reliability of its core cloud business, Azure. This event followed closely after an AWS cloud service outage just one week prior, placing a spotlight on the fragility of global internet infrastructure that relies on a few major cloud providers.