Microsoft was hit with outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company's scheduled earnings release.
Users on social media reported problems accessing their sites and services running on Microsoft's products, and the company's websites, including its Xbox and investor relations pages, were down. The problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which relies on user reports.
"We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page."
The Azure support account on X said, "We're investigating an issue impacting several Azure services," and that "customers may experience issues when accessing services."
The latest update on Azure's status page says that issues began with AFD at about noon ET, and that customers and Microsoft services using AFD "may have experienced latencies, timeouts and errors." The company said it suspects an "inadvertent configuration change" was the trigger, and that it's "rolling back to our last known good state" for AFD services.
Microsoft said that it anticipates "recovery to happen" by 7:20 p.m. ET.
"Although we are seeing signs of recovery and have an estimated timeline, customers may also consider implementing failover strategies using Azure Traffic Manager to redirect traffic from Azure Front Door to their origin servers as an interim measure," the company wrote.
Microsoft's 365 status account wrote that its services are "experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage."
The service disruptions come a little over a week after larger rival Amazon Web Services reported a major outage that took down numerous websites. Throughout the day on Oct. 20, AWS said it observed "increased error rates" for customers when trying to launch new instances in EC2, its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.
AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market as of the first quarter, according to Canalys. Azure is second at 23%, followed by Google's cloud unit at 10%. Azure and Google Cloud have been growing faster of late, driven by a boom in artificial intelligence workloads.
All three companies are set to report quarterly results this week, starting with Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday after the bell. Amazon reports on Thursday.
Alaska Airlines said on Wednesday afternoon that it's currently "experiencing a disruption to key systems," including websites, due to the outage on Azure, "where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted." Alaska closed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year.
In March, Microsoft suffered an outage over a weekend that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
