Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella departs following a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 4, 2025.
Eric Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft was hit with outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company’s scheduled earnings release.
Users reported problems on social media accessing their sites and services running on Microsoft’s products, and the company’s website was inaccessible. The problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which relies on user reports.
Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company acknowledged the issues on its Azure and 365 support accounts on X.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting Azure Front Door services,” the Azure support account said. “Customers may experience intermittent request failures or latency. Updates will be provided shortly.”
On Azure’s status page, the company said “customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal.”
Microsoft’s 365 status account wrote, “We’re investigating reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center. More details can be found in the Service Health Dashboard under MO1181369.” The account followed by saying, “We’re rerouting affected traffic to alternate healthy infrastructure as a near-term resolution while our investigation into the source of the issue is ongoing.”
The service disruptions come a little over a week after larger rival Amazon Web Services reported a major outage that took down numerous major websites. Throughout the day on Oct. 20, AWS said it observed “increased error rates” for customers when trying to launch new instances in EC2, its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.
AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market as of the first quarter, according to Canalys. Azure is second at 23%, followed by Google’s cloud unit at 10%. Azure and Google Cloud have been growing faster of late, driven by a boom in artificial intelligence workloads.
All three companies are set to report quarterly results this week, starting with Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday after the bell. Amazon reports on Thursday.
Microsoft is set to report fiscal first-quarter results after the close of trading. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In March, Microsoft suffered an outage over a weekend that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
