Microsoft Azure down: What caused the outage? Which services are affected?

Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure experienced a major outage on Wednesday (October 29), disrupting access to several widely used services across the globe, including Office 365, Xbox Live, Minecraft, and Copilot.

The issue stems from problems linked to Azure Front Door—the infrastructure that routes traffic across Microsoft’s cloud environment—and its domain name system (DNS), which directs internet traffic by converting URLs into IP addresses. DNS failures can block users from reaching apps and cloud services entirely.