A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted access to Azure and 365 services on Wednesday, just hours before the company released its quarterly earnings.
The downtime affected thousands of users globally, with many reporting difficulties logging into their cloud accounts, Teams meetings, and other Microsoft services.
According to Hindustan Times, the outage began around 11:40 ET (17:40 SAST), when users started reporting problems with Azure and Microsoft 365.
The company confirmed the incident shortly afterward on its official support accounts, saying it was “investigating an issue impacting several Azure services.”
Users attempting to access the Azure management portal were met with timeouts and service errors.
In a series of updates, Microsoft said it suspected “an inadvertent configuration change” had triggered the outage.
Engineers immediately began blocking all new configuration changes to prevent the issue from spreading and started rolling back systems to a previous stable state.
“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,” Microsoft said.
The company also rerouted affected traffic to alternate infrastructure as a temporary solution while rolling back the update.
By late evening, Microsoft confirmed partial restoration of access to Azure’s administrative portal after redirecting services away from Azure Front Door, its web traffic management tool.
The company noted, however, that some users might still experience delays or limited functionality while full recovery continued.
The outage came at a sensitive time for the company, which was hours away from announcing its first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026.
The timing drew attention from analysts, as Microsoft’s Azure cloud services have been central to its financial growth.
According to CNBC, Microsoft reported earnings of $3.67 per share on revenue of $75.33 billion for the quarter, marking a 15% increase from $65.6 billion a year earlier.
Azure and other cloud services accounted for a major share of this growth, with revenue climbing 34% year-on-year.
Analysts noted that the company’s strong performance was driven by continued investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and expanding enterprise cloud adoption.
CEO Satya Nadella has positioned Azure as the backbone of Microsoft’s AI ambitions, supported by its partnership with OpenAI.
The company recently disclosed that it holds a 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm, valued at about $135 billion.
Microsoft’s CFO, Amy Hood, told investors that the company planned to spend $30 billion in capital expenditures this quarter to meet growing AI demand.
Despite the outage, analysts do not expect any long-term impact on Microsoft’s financial performance. TD Cowen and Jefferies analysts both maintained “buy” ratings, citing Azure’s continued strength and the growing demand for AI-driven computing.
However, the brief disruption highlighted the growing dependence of global businesses on Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.
At the time of reporting, Microsoft said service recovery was nearing completion, with additional monitoring in place to prevent future incidents.
The company promised a full post-incident report to explain the root cause and detail steps for preventing similar occurrences.
