Microsoft misses live updates: Services restored after hours-long IT outage at Azure hits 365, Xbox and more

The Azure outage may have cost Microsoft’s gaming division about $1.2 million an hour, according to an analysis by Support My Website, a web support firm.

“This $1.2 million hourly loss is just the damage to Microsoft’s own pocket; it doesn’t even begin to count the massive, unforeseen losses for all the other major brands, from airlines to retailers, who were also brought offline,” Lucas Lopvet, director of support at Support My Website, told The independent in an email.

Today’s long Azure outage appears to have ended.

A Microsoft dashboard showing the health of the cloud service reported no active incidents Wednesday night.

The same portal earlier showed that engineers were rolling out fixes to patch up the cloud service as the outage appeared to catch travel sites, consumer apps and gaming services.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft for more information.

Throughout the day, Microsoft stock held relatively steady despite the ongoing Azure outage, with shares down about a tenth of a percent.

But in overnight trading, things took a turn for the worse, with shares down about 3.76 percent Wednesday night, according to Yahoo! Finance.

Just when you thought it was over, the Azure outage might last a little longer than planned.

The company has previously estimated that full remediation of problems on the platform would have happened about half an hour ago.

Now it has revised that estimate, and the company says it will take about 40 more minutes for its technical fixes to take effect.

“We have revised our mitigation timing and are currently tracking for full mitigation by 00:40 UTC 30 October 2025, although we will communicate if mitigation is achieved earlier,” the Azure status page says.

The Azure outage may be coming to an end.

Users across a range of applications reported far fewer problems during Wednesday night on applications such as Xbox Network, Microsoft 365, Minecraft and Outlook, according to crowd-sourced data on Downdetector.

The drop in reports could simply be a factor of consumers reporting their issues once and then resuming their days, or it could be a sign that the technical fixes Microsoft has outlined to address the problem are actually taking effect.

The Azure outage may soon be over, Microsoft says.

The company indicated in a web post that it expects its technical fixes to take full effect and alleviate the problem momentarily.

“We are seeing strong signs of improvement across affected regions and are targeting full mitigation by 23:20 UTC on October 29, 2025,” the company wrote.

Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud outages in recent days are a warning sign.

Because so many organizations and businesses rely on a handful of giant tech companies for key services like cloud computing, problems within one company quickly radiate across the Internet, according to Munish Walther-Puri, an adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and the former director of cyber risk for the city of New York.

“Organizations may think they are insulated by their choice of cloud provider, but the dependencies run deeper,” he said THE CABLE. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, the exposure is multiplied. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outcomes demonstrate the brittleness of our digital backbone.”

Microsoft has just released an in-depth overview of some of the key areas affected by today’s Azure outage.

Here are the products they flagged: App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Indexer and Video.

Users have also reported issues on Microsoft-affiliated platforms such as Xbox Live, Minecraft and Office 365.

Online crowd-sourcing sites and social media can provide early warning of cloud outages, but the most reliable way to track the status of platforms like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS is through official company channels.

You can find the Azure dashboard here and AWS here.

Recent cloud outages highlight the vulnerabilities of relying so heavily on cloud computing – or “the cloud” as it’s often called. But there are ways to mitigate some of the risks.

Here is a piece from Jongkil Jay Jeongwritten after last week’s Amazon outage about what can be done.