Azure Outage Caused by Front Door Configuration Change

On Oct. 29, Microsoft's Azure experienced a major outage centered on an inadvertent tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door that caused DNS and routing failures beginning around noon ET and left Azure, Microsoft 365, Xbox and many customer applications offline for roughly eight hours. The incident generated more than 18,000 outage reports and disrupted airlines, retailers, banks and gamers, briefly affecting high-profile customers including Alaska Airlines, Heathrow Airport, Starbucks, Costco and Capital One and impacting Microsoft's investor pages. Microsoft engineers stopped the faulty change, rolled back to a known-good configuration, blocked further Azure Front Door changes and gradually rerouted traffic to restore services, though some customers experienced lingering issues during recovery. The outage — coming days after a large AWS incident — has renewed concerns about market concentration, operational resilience and regulatory scrutiny of the cloud duopoly, and regulators and governments including UK authorities are preparing reviews and response plans. Separately, IBM reported a cloud-hosted quantum-computer outage (ibm_aachen), underscoring fragility across both classical and emerging cloud services.