Microsoft Azure suffered a widespread outage Tuesday, taking down not just Xbox Live and Microsoft 365, but cascading across the enterprise landscape to ground Alaska Airlines flights and crash Starbucks' payment systems. An "inadvertent configuration change" triggered the DNS-level failure that exposed just how deeply businesses depend on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft just learned the hard way that when your cloud infrastructure hiccups, half the internet feels it. The company's Azure platform went down Tuesday afternoon in what officials are calling an "inadvertent configuration change" - corporate speak for someone pushed the wrong button and broke the internet for millions of users.
The outage hit at the worst possible time, right as Microsoft was reporting quarterly earnings. While executives were likely discussing growth metrics on investor calls, their own websites were crawling to a halt. The irony wasn't lost on users watching Xbox Live crash during what should have been a victory lap for the company's cloud business.
But this wasn't just a Microsoft problem - it became an everything problem. Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines found themselves telling passengers to show up at airport counters for boarding passes because their online systems couldn't connect. "Our teams worked quickly to stand up our backup infrastructure," Alaska Airlines announced on X, revealing just how dependent airlines have become on cloud services for basic operations.
The retail carnage was equally dramatic. Starbucks customers couldn't order their afternoon caffeine fix through the app, while Costco's website went dark completely. Kroger told customers its mobile apps were "experiencing an unexpected outage," and Capital One users reported widespread banking issues - a stark reminder that financial services now run on the same cloud infrastructure as gaming platforms.
According to Microsoft's Azure status page, the problems started around 16:00 UTC and stemmed from issues with Azure Front Door, the company's content delivery network. The technical explanation reads like a textbook example of how modern internet architecture can fail: "customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors."
The affected services list read like a who's who of enterprise software: Azure Active Directory, SQL Database, Virtual Desktop, and dozens of others that power everything from corporate email to customer-facing websites. It's the kind of comprehensive failure that keeps IT executives awake at night, wondering about their backup plans.