Redazione RHC : 2 November 2025 09:21
On October 29, a massive outage of Microsoft ‘s Azure cloud platform caused global disruptions, disrupting business and public services for over eight hours. The incident affected numerous customers, including Alaska Airlines , Heathrow Airport , Vodafone , Costco , Starbucks , Kroger , as well as thousands of Microsoft 365 and Xbox users.
According to the company, the cause of the outage was an “inadvertent system configuration change.” On the evening of October 29, Microsoft confirmed that the platform was back up and running and that error and latency levels had returned to normal, although it noted that a small number of users may still experience residual difficulties.
The outage occurred just hours after the company’s quarterly earnings report was released, further impacting its reputation. For several hours, users were unable to access Microsoft 365 , the Azure portal , and the Xbox Live network, with some even reporting that Microsoft’s official website was temporarily down.
The outage affected the transportation and retail sectors. Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines reported operational difficulties, while London Heathrow Airport’s website was offline for part of the day.
Telecommunications giant Vodafone and several international chains, including Costco , Starbucks and Kroger , also reported unexpected outages on their websites and apps.
On the Downdetector platform, over 18,000 users have reported problems with Azure, while around 20,000 have reported outages with Microsoft 365.
The incident is part of a series of outages that have affected major cloud service providers in recent months. On October 20 , just nine days earlier, Amazon AWS had suffered a blackout that lasted over 15 hours, impacting access to websites and apps like Snapchat and Reddit .
The previous March, another Microsoft system failure had prevented tens of thousands of users from using Outlook and other business services.
According to Griffith , professor of engineering at Cornell University , episodes of this kind highlight the fragility of the global network: «The cloud market is dominated by a few large companies, and this concentrates the world’s digital resources in a small number of hands» , he said.
Data from analytics firm Canalys shows that in the first quarter, Amazon AWS held 32% of the cloud infrastructure market, followed by Microsoft Azure with 23% and Google Cloud with 10% .
Experts warn that the concentration of digital services in the hands of a few operators can generate economic and systemic risks. Global losses associated with a large-scale disruption could reach tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, but the most serious impact, according to analysts, concerns the growing vulnerability of global digital infrastructures.
Byrne , an analyst at eMarketer , pointed out that the increased dependence on cloud platforms could amplify the consequences of such blackouts: «Companies will have to focus on multi-cloud strategies and disaster recovery plans to reduce the risks of a total blockage» .
Analysts agree that these incidents could accelerate the transition to distributed, more resilient, and less vendor-dependent cloud architectures.
Redazione