The outage of Microsoft’s cloud services, which occurred just hours before the release of its quarterly results, is just the latest in a long series of outages that are exposing a structural vulnerability in our digital ecosystem. When platforms like Azure or AWS go down, the ripple effect spreads far beyond the technological sphere: entire companies, public services, communications platforms, and even airlines find themselves paralyzed.
The cloud, born as a symbol of efficiency, flexibility, and scalability, has now become a critical dependency . Its promise of always-on availability clashes with the reality of centralized points of failure . A few hours of downtime are enough to demonstrate how fragile the digital world is when entrusted to a few global providers.
Social media users reported being unable to access Microsoft websites and services running on Microsoft products; several Microsoft websites ( including the Xbox website and its investor relations page ) were also down.
According to Downdetector, a user-reported bug tracking platform, the problem began to manifest itself around 11:40 AM Eastern Time.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in an email: ” We are working to resolve an issue affecting Azure Front Door that has caused reduced availability of some services. Users should continue to monitor ‘Service Health Alerts’ for updates on this issue on the Azure Status page.”
This outage occurred just over a week after Microsoft’s main competitor, Amazon Web Services, suffered a massive outage that paralyzed numerous websites. On October 20, AWS reported a “significant increase in error rates” when users attempted to launch new instances of its popular EC2 cloud service.
According to data from market research firm Canalys, in the first quarter of 2025, AWS led the cloud infrastructure market with a 32% market share; Microsoft Azure ranked second with 23%, and Google Cloud third with 10% . Recently, driven by growing demand for AI workloads, Azure and Google Cloud have surpassed AWS in terms of growth rate.
All three cloud services giants will release their quarterly earnings reports this week: Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet will be the first to report their results after the market closes on Wednesday; Amazon will release its earnings report on Thursday.
Alaska Airlines said Wednesday afternoon that its “critical systems are experiencing disruption” (including its website) due to an Azure service outage: “Many Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted on the Azure platform.” Alaska Airlines completed its acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines for $1.9 billion last year.
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