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Microsoft is battling a significant Azure Front Door outage that has disrupted access to Microsoft 365 services and administrative portals since 07:40 UTC Thursday morning. The content delivery network (CDN) failure primarily impacted users across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, causing widespread connection timeouts and delays when accessing critical services like Azure Portal and Entra admin center.

According to Microsoft's service alerts, engineering teams identified Kubernetes instances as the root cause of capacity loss across Azure Front Door (AFD) infrastructure. "We've restored approximately 98% of the AFD service. We're actively monitoring telemetry to confirm full recovery," Microsoft stated in an incident update. The company simultaneously initiated failover procedures for Microsoft 365 Portal services to accelerate restoration.

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Azure outage status during incident (Source: BleepingComputer)

Five hours into the outage, Microsoft reported recovering 96% of impacted resources, with approximately 4% of initially affected customers still experiencing issues. Residual effects included intermittent access problems to Microsoft 365 applications and failures in the Windows app web client for cloud PC connections. The incident follows two similar outages in recent months—a global Microsoft 365 disruption resolved Wednesday and an admin center access failure in July.

Technical Implications

  • Kubernetes Dependencies: The incident highlights critical infrastructure dependencies on container orchestration, where Kubernetes instance failures can cascade through CDN layers
  • Multi-Region Impact: Despite Azure's global footprint, regional service degradation affected three continents simultaneously
  • Recovery Complexity: Microsoft's phased approach—restarting instances while failing over services—reveals the operational challenges in distributed system recovery

This persistent pattern of outages underscores the fragility beneath hyperscale cloud architectures. As enterprises increasingly centralize operations on platforms like Azure, the operational and financial risks of CDN-level failures grow exponentially. Microsoft's transparency through Service Health Dashboard updates provides crucial visibility, yet each incident erodes confidence in the "always-on" cloud paradigm.

Source: BleepingComputer