Microsoft's Azure cloud and Office 365 services crashed Wednesday afternoon, leaving thousands of enterprise customers offline just hours before the company's scheduled quarterly earnings release. The timing couldn't be worse - with cloud growth being a key investor focus and Amazon Web Services suffering a similar outage just last week.
Microsoft just got hit with the worst possible timing for a cloud outage. The company's Azure infrastructure and Office 365 services crashed Wednesday afternoon, leaving enterprise customers scrambling just hours before Microsoft reports its quarterly earnings to investors.
The outage began around 11:40 AM ET according to Downdetector, with users flooding social media to report problems accessing everything from company websites to critical business applications. Microsoft's own investor relations page went dark, creating an awkward preview for the earnings call where cloud growth will be front and center.
"We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. The company's Azure status page pointed to an "inadvertent configuration change" as the likely culprit, with engineers working to roll back to previous settings.
The real-world impact hit immediately. Alaska Airlines announced it was "experiencing a disruption to key systems" including websites, since both Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines operations run on Azure infrastructure. The airline completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year, making the combined operations heavily dependent on Microsoft's cloud.
This outage comes at a particularly sensitive moment for the cloud wars. Just over a week ago, Amazon Web Services suffered its own major outage on October 20, taking down numerous websites when customers couldn't launch new EC2 instances. That incident highlighted how dependent the modern internet has become on a handful of cloud providers.