Azure Outage History: 127 of 219 Microsoft Post Incident Reviews Began With Microsoft’s Own Change
Azure outage history, case by case: we recovered 219 post incident reviews (PIRs) that Microsoft published on its Azure status history page from November 2016 to September 2026, and 127 of them (58%) describe an Azure outage that began with Microsoft’s own configuration change, code rollout or maintenance work. The median impact window was 5 h 45 min. Power and cooling caused 25.
Case files
219Azure PIRs and RCAs coded, 2016 to 2026 (78 still on Microsoft’s page)
Own change
58%began with a Microsoft config change, rollout or maintenance (127 of 219)
Median window
5 h 45 minfrom first impact to mitigation (215 reviews with both times)
Power and cooling
14 of 66reviews since June 2022, against 6 of 88 before Nov 2019
2026 so far
10reviews Jan to Sept 2026; 3 were power events
Microsoft writes a PIR after each broad Azure incident and posts it on azure.status.microsoft. The page keeps each review for five years, so it currently shows 81 entries starting in November 2021 (it showed 84 on October 13, 2026, before 3 older ones aged out). We pulled every entry through the page’s own history endpoint, then recovered older reviews from 101 Internet Archive captures of the page under its three past addresses. We read each review and coded what started the incident, then parsed the impact window and regions from Microsoft’s own summary. This is the same method we used for the AWS outage history and the Cloudflare outage post-mortems.
The biggest Azure outages, in Microsoft’s words
Eight case files stand out for reach, length, or what they reveal. Each quote is a sentence from the PIR itself.
Azure Front Door, Connectivity issues across multiple regions
8 h 24 min impact window · multiple regions or global
“A specific sequence of customer configuration changes, performed across two different control plane build versions, resulted in incompatible customer configuration metadata being generated.”
Latent bug, no change named Read the PIR
Azure Front Door, Access issues in multiple regions
8 h 10 min impact window · multiple regions or global
“By bypassing the protection system, the erroneous metadata was inadvertently able to propagate to later stages, and triggered the bug in the data plane that crashed the data plane service.”
Configuration or operational change Began with a Microsoft change Read the PIR
Storage, Impact to multiple services in Central US
1 d 20 min impact window · Central US
“The workflow which generates the list did not detect the ‘missing’ source files, and published an allow list with incomplete VM Host address range information to all Storage scale units in the region.”
Configuration or operational change Began with a Microsoft change Read the PIR
Multiple services, Power/cooling issues in West US 2
22 h 6 min impact window · West US 2
“A severe thunderstorm produced lightning strikes, resulting in utility power disturbances across multiple datacenter facilities serving the West US 2 region.”
Power or cooling Read the PIR
Power event impacting multiple services, West US
20 h 26 min impact window · West US
“During this incident, although utility power was still active, an electrical failure in an onsite transformer resulted in the loss of utility power to the datacenter.”
Power or cooling Read the PIR
Virtual Machines, Managed identities for Azure resources, and dependent services, Service management issues in multiple regions
6 h 27 min impact window · multiple regions or global
“Due to a data synchronization problem in the targeting logic, the policy was incorrectly applied to a subset of storage accounts that are intentionally configured to allow anonymous read access for platform functionality.”
Configuration or operational change Began with a Microsoft change Read the PIR
Multi-service outage, Asia-Pacific Area
1 d 8 h 11 min impact window · Southeast Asia, East Asia
“Power management systems managed the voltage dip as designed, however a subset of chiller units that provide cooling to the datacenter tripped and shut down.”
Power or cooling Read the PIR
Authentication errors across multiple Microsoft services
14 h 37 min impact window · multiple regions or global
“This exposed a bug where the automation incorrectly ignored that “retain” state, leading it to remove that particular key.”
Latent bug, no change named Read the PIR
Impact window: first and second times in the PIR’s opening summary, converted to UTC. Card colour shows the root-cause category.
The two Azure Front Door reviews of October 2025 belong together. On October 9, Microsoft temporarily bypassed a protection system to clean up bad tenant metadata, and the metadata crashed the data plane in about 26% of Front Door resources in Europe and Africa; a second review the same day covers the management portals that went down with it. Twenty days later a valid customer configuration change produced metadata that hit a latent data plane bug, and the October 29 incident lasted 8 h 24 min. Front Door appears in 13 reviews in total.
Azure outages in 2026 so far
Microsoft has published 9 reviews for incidents between January and September 2026, and an Internet Archive capture preserves one more that is no longer on the page. 3 of the 10 were power or cooling events in the western US, including the two longest of the year.
| Date | Tracking ID | Incident | What started it | Window |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 10 | XM22-5_G | Power event impacting multiple services in AZ01, West US 2 (archive only) | Power or cooling | 7 h 33 min |
| Feb 02 | FNJ8-VQZ | Virtual Machines, Managed identities for Azure resources, and dependent services, Service management issues in multiple regions | Configuration or operational change | 6 h 27 min |
| Feb 07 | _SVS-5_G | Power event impacting multiple services, West US | Power or cooling | 20 h 26 min |
| Mar 09 | 8GCS-858 | Azure OpenAI, GPT-5.2 availability degradation in 7 regions | Configuration or operational change | 20 h 12 min |
| Apr 24 | 5GP8-W0G | Multiple services, Control plane issues in East US | Latent bug, no change named | 11 h 52 min |
| May 29 | LYXT-C1Z | Azure OpenAI Service, Latency and intermittent failures in multiple regions | Code or update rollout | 7 h 26 min |
| May 29 | GHRP-84G | Multiple services, Power/cooling issues in West US 2 | Power or cooling | 22 h 6 min |
| Jul 23 | ZJV6-SGG | Network connectivity, Issues accessing resources in West US | Configuration or operational change | 4 h 57 min |
| Sep 29 | 7QL5-Z50 | Azure OpenAI Service, Foundry Agent Service, Foundry Models, and Azure AI services, Intermittent request failures and latency in Sweden Central | Code or update rollout | 5 h 55 min |
| Sep 30 | 7Q30-010 | Network Connectivity, Gateway service degradation in multiple regions | Code or update rollout | 5 h 45 min |
The January 10 entry (XM22-5_G) was a preliminary review for a West US 2 power event that a later capture no longer shows; Microsoft removes some entries once the final review goes privately to affected customers.
What causes Azure outages?
Configuration and operational changes lead every era. Across all 219 reviews, 78 began with a configuration or operational change (including maintenance, migrations and capacity work) and 38 with a code, OS or certificate rollout. Only 21 describe a latent bug that surfaced without a change Microsoft names. Physical causes are smaller but growing: 25 power or cooling events and 22 hardware, fiber or network device faults.
Configuration or operational change (78)Code or update rollout (38)Latent bug, no change named (21)Load or capacity (23)Power or cooling (25)Hardware, fiber or network device (22)Third party or attack (11)Not determined (1)
Eras follow Microsoft’s own publishing rules for the history page. The first era is a sample: the page then showed only recent items, and captures exist for some months only.
The power share rose from 7% of reviews before November 2019 to 21% since June 2022. The two periods are not like for like: since June 1, 2022 the page only carries PIRs for broad issues, so smaller incidents of every kind dropped out. Changes still started most incidents: 38 of 66 since June 2022. Of the 14 power or cooling reviews in that period, 11 describe impact confined to a single Availability Zone.
| Era | What the page covered | Reviews | Began with a Microsoft change | Power or cooling | Hardware or fiber | Third party or attack | Median window |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 to Nov 19, 2019 | archive sample | 88 | 49 (56%) | 6 (7%) | 10 | 5 | 5 h 13 min |
| Nov 20, 2019 to May 2022 | all publicly communicated issues | 65 | 40 (62%) | 5 (8%) | 6 | 3 | 4 h 41 min |
| June 2022 to Sept 2026 | broad issues only | 66 | 38 (58%) | 14 (21%) | 6 | 3 | 8 h 36 min |
Which Azure regions have the most outages?
West Europe is named in 34 reviews, more than any other region, followed by East US and East US 2. Reviews naming at least one US region total 57. But the most common answer is no single region: 92 reviews (42%) describe global, multi-region or service-wide faults, led by identity (21), networking (17), Resource Manager and the portal (14) and Front Door (10). For those, picking a different region would not have helped.
Darker: more reviews that yearNo single region named
Regions named in four or more reviews, from the title and opening summary of each PIR. A review naming two regions counts in both rows. *2026 runs to September.
How long Azure outages last
The median impact window across 215 reviews is 5 h 45 min, and half of all windows fall between 2 h 44 min and 10 h 7 min. Power and cooling events run longest, at a median of 8 h 32 min. Hardware, fiber and network device faults, and third-party problems, are the shortest, at 3 h 15 min and 3 h 10 min.
Median per category
Log scale. One dot per review with a start and end time in its summary. Some long windows cover slow, partial impact (for example metrics delays) rather than a hard outage.
Every Azure post incident review in one table
All 219 reviews, newest first. The key sentence is taken verbatim from each review’s root-cause section, chosen by our script as the sentence that most directly states the cause.
| Date | Tracking ID | Incident | What started it | Own change? | Window | Regions named | Key sentence (verbatim) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-30 | 7Q30-010 | Network Connectivity, Gateway service degradation in multiple regions | Code or update rollout | Yes | 5 h 45 min | None named | Before this incident, a temporary deployment restriction had paused operating system updates for a group of networking gateways. |
| 2026-09-29 | 7QL5-Z50 | Azure OpenAI Service, Foundry Agent Service, Foundry Models, and Azure AI services, Intermittent request failures and latency in Sweden Central | Code or update rollout | Yes | 5 h 55 min | Sweden Central | As part of this deployment, the internal service’s caches were cleared and – because the deployment coincided with peak traffic hours in the region – this produced a large number of cache misses, where requests were made for information no longer stored in the cache. |
| 2026-07-23 | ZJV6-SGG | Network connectivity, Issues accessing resources in West US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 57 min | West US | A defect in our blast radius analysis system incorrectly expanded the scope of the repair event to include all optical devices egressing a specific datacenter. |
| 2026-05-29 | LYXT-C1Z | Azure OpenAI Service, Latency and intermittent failures in multiple regions | Code or update rollout | Yes | 7 h 26 min | Australia East | The triggering condition was a change in an upstream API layer used by a Microsoft first-party workload, Microsoft 365, which relies on Azure OpenAI for some request processing scenarios, including Copilot-related experiences. |
| 2026-05-29 | GHRP-84G | Multiple services, Power/cooling issues in West US 2 | Power or cooling | No | 22 h 6 min | West US 2 | A severe thunderstorm produced lightning strikes, resulting in utility power disturbances across multiple datacenter facilities serving the West US 2 region. |
| 2026-04-24 | 5GP8-W0G | Multiple services, Control plane issues in East US | Latent bug, no change named | No | 11 h 52 min | East US | During normal platform operations, one partition of the PubSub control plane service in a single Availability Zone (AZ-01) experienced lock contention errors for several minutes, resulting in operations on that partition to timeout and fail. |
| 2026-03-09 | 8GCS-858 | Azure OpenAI, GPT-5.2 availability degradation in 7 regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 20 h 12 min | Australia East, Central US, East US 2, Korea Central, Norway East, Sweden Central, UK South | A recent update to the Azure OpenAI GPT 5.2 model introduced a configuration change that was not compatible with the version of the model engine code running in production. |
| 2026-02-07 | _SVS-5_G | Power event impacting multiple services, West US | Power or cooling | No | 20 h 26 min | West US | During this incident, although utility power was still active, an electrical failure in an onsite transformer resulted in the loss of utility power to the datacenter. |
| 2026-02-02 | FNJ8-VQZ | Virtual Machines, Managed identities for Azure resources, and dependent services, Service management issues in multiple regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h 27 min | None named | Due to a data synchronization problem in the targeting logic, the policy was incorrectly applied to a subset of storage accounts that are intentionally configured to allow anonymous read access for platform functionality. |
| 2026-01-10 | XM22-5_G | Power event impacting multiple services in AZ01, West US 2 | Power or cooling | No | 7 h 33 min | West US 2 | This sudden loss of power caused the affected hardware to shut down, resulting in interruptions for services dependent on those resources. |
| 2025-12-22 | FV31-PQG | Entra Privileged Identity Management, Customers experiencing API failures | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 10 h 25 min | None named | As part of ongoing work to improve how the PIM service stores and manages data, configuration changes which manage the backend databases were deployed incrementally using safe deployment practices. |
| 2025-12-08 | ML7_-DWG | Azure Resource Manager, Service management failures affecting Azure Government | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 9 min | None named | On 08 December 2025, an inadvertent automated key rotation resulted in ARM failures to fetch authorization policies that are needed to evaluate access. |
| 2025-12-08 | JSNV-FBZ | Azure Resource Manager, Service management failures affecting Azure in China | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 9 h 10 min | None named | On 08 December 2025, an inadvertent automated key rotation resulted in ARM failures to fetch authorization policies that are needed to evaluate access. |
| 2025-11-05 | 2LGD-9VG | Thermal event impacting multiple services in AZ01, West Europe | Power or cooling | No | 9 h 32 min | West Europe | The incident was triggered by a voltage sag in the utility grid, which caused cooling units to shut down and temperatures to rise above normal thresholds in a datacenter located in Physical Availability Zone 01 in the West Europe region. |
| 2025-10-29 | YKYN-BWZ | Azure Front Door, Connectivity issues across multiple regions | Latent bug, no change named | No | 8 h 24 min | None named | A specific sequence of customer configuration changes, performed across two different control plane build versions, resulted in incompatible customer configuration metadata being generated. |
| 2025-10-09 | QKNQ-PB8 | Azure Portal and other management portals, Access issues in multiple regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 16 min | None named | Automation scripts were used to update the traffic load balancing configuration to split traffic across multiple routes. |
| 2025-10-09 | QNBQ-5W8 | Azure Front Door, Access issues in multiple regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 8 h 10 min | None named | By bypassing the protection system, the erroneous metadata was inadvertently able to propagate to later stages, and triggered the bug in the data plane that crashed the data plane service. |
| 2025-09-26 | BT6W-FX0 | Network Connectivity, Multiple services impacted in Switzerland North | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 22 h 5 min | Switzerland North | This type of planned change is intended to be impactless but, due to the malformed certificate, authorization of connectivity for load balancer between nodes and resources could not complete. |
| 2025-09-10 | VKY3-PF8 | Service management operations failures in East US 2 | Code or update rollout | Yes | 9 h 47 min | East US 2 | However, a performance issue affecting a subset of Allocator machines triggered the new throttling logic which, because of the high throughput demand in the East US 2 region, caused VM provisioning requests to retry more aggressively than the control plane could handle. |
| 2025-03-18 | Z_SZ-NV8 | Network Connectivity, Availability issues in East US | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 3 h 15 min | East US | Due to some capacity being out of service from the fiber cut, this failed state was not immediately flagged in our systems as the down capacity was not carrying production traffic. |
| 2025-03-03 | ZT0X-9B8 | Network Connectivity, Toronto edge site issues | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 2 h 15 min | None named | While we were performing an initial investigation into the cause of device failure, at 16:22 UTC the redundant device also experienced a hardware failure, due to a similar memory issue on the line cards – the line cards restarted, and did not initialize properly after startup, to forward traffic. |
| 2025-02-25 | TMS9-J_8 | Microsoft Entra ID, DNS authentication failures for single sign-on and Entra Connect Sync | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 8 h 33 min | None named | As part of an ongoing maintenance effort, a change was made which inadvertently removed an intermediate DNS record and associated traffic manager used in the mentioned scenarios. |
| 2025-01-08 | PLP3-1W8 | Networking issues impacting Azure Services in East US 2 | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 d 2 h 13 min | East US 2 | In this case, recycling was executed across the replicas in ‘parallel’, causing the partition to lose quorum. |
| 2024-12-26 | CNF4-N_0 | Services impacted after zonal power issue, South Central US | Power or cooling | No | 1 d 50 min | South Central US | This incident was initially triggered by a utility power loss, itself caused by a localized ground fault, in which a high voltage underground line failed. |
| 2024-11-13 | PSM0-BQ8 | Azure Storage, Unreachable Blob and Data Lake storage accounts in multiple regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 11 h 40 min | None named | The incident was caused by an unintentional deletion of Traffic Manager profiles for the impacted storage accounts. |
| 2024-09-27 | HSKF-FB0 | Azure Resource Manager, Issues in Azure US Government regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 38 min | US Gov Arizona, US Gov Texas, US Gov Virginia | When this account was misconfigured, the change immediately applied to all replicas impacting ARM in all regions. |
| 2024-09-16 | 1LG8-1X0 | Azure Virtual Desktop, Unable to create new connections, impacting US regions | Latent bug, no change named | No | 1 h 50 min | East US 2, Central US, East US, North Central US, South Central US, West Central US, West US, West US 2, West US 3 | We determined that this incident was caused by a degradation in the redo process on one of the secondary copies servicing the US geography, which caused failures to access service resources. |
| 2024-09-05 | HVZN-VB0 | Azure Resource Manager, Control plane issues in China North 3 | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 13 h 30 min | China North 3 | The certificate rotation in the Azure China regions exposed a latent bug in the update process which caused the processes to begin crashing. |
| 2024-08-05 | 0N_5-PQ0 | Azure Front Door, Intermittent issues with Microsoft services using AFD | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 27 min | None named | This initial impact on availability triggered a latent bug in the internal service’s client application, which caused an aggressive request storm. |
| 2024-07-30 | KTY1-HW8 | Azure Front Door, Connectivity issues in multiple regions | Third party or attack | No | 2 h 13 min | None named | This happened because of Network control plane failures to that specific site, due to a local power outage. |
| 2024-07-18 | 1K80-N_8 | Storage, Impact to multiple services in Central US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 d 20 min | Central US | The workflow which generates the list did not detect the ‘missing’ source files, and published an allow list with incomplete VM Host address range information to all Storage scale units in the region. |
| 2024-07-13 | 4L44-3F0 | Azure OpenAI Service, Errors in multiple regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 23 h 35 min | Australia East, Brazil South, Canada Central, Canada East, East US 2, France Central, Korea Central, North Central US, Norway East, Poland Central, South Africa North, South India, Sweden Central, UK South | Because the configuration change was delivered as a content update at a global scope, there existed no safe deployment process to gate the effect of the change in region-specific order, resulting in a multi-region incident. |
| 2024-07-12 | FTVR-L9Z | Managed Identities for Azure resources, Failures in Australia East | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 33 min | Australia East | The process for rolling out this change was to deploy a service change to support automatic keys, and then roll over our keys into the new system in each region one-by-one, following our safe deployment process. |
| 2024-04-22 | V_BH-7DZ | DNS resolution issues impacted Azure in China | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 15 min | None named | As DNS caches across the Internet gradually timed out, DNS resolvers made requests to refresh the information for the two domains and received responses containing the inactive nameservers, resulting in failures to resolve FQDNs in those domains. |
| 2024-04-19 | QS3K-BPZ | Azure Database for MySQL/MariaDB in West US, Azure Databricks in 3 regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 4 min | West US, West US 2, South Central US | As part of ongoing service maintenance, compute hardware hosting the gateway service is periodically refreshed to ensure we provide the most secure and performant experience. |
| 2024-03-14 | VT60-RPZ | Network connectivity – Multiple services impacted in South Africa North and South Africa West | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 1 d 27 min | South Africa North, South Africa West | In this case, our South Africa Regions has four physically diverse subsea cable systems serving the country and the designed failure mode is that three out of four can fail with no impact to our customers. |
| 2024-01-21 | NKRF-1TG | Azure Resource Manager – Services impacted by ARM failures | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 7 h 28 min | Central US, East US, South Central US, West Central US, West Europe | On 21 January 2024, an internal maintenance process made a configuration change to an internal tenant which was enrolled in this preview. |
| 2023-10-20 | MM12-HSG | Services impacted after power issue – West Europe | Power or cooling | No | not stated | West Europe | A subset of those generators supporting that section failed to take over as expected during the switch over from utility power, resulting in the impact. |
| 2023-09-16 | 2LZ0-3DG | Services impacted by power, BIOS, and Virtual Machine issues, East US | Power or cooling | No | 11 h 36 min | East US | This logic prevented the STS from transferring back to the redundant power, after the primary UPS failed completely, which ultimately caused a power loss to a subset of the scale units within the datacenter, at 07:24 UTC, for 1.9 seconds. |
| 2023-08-30 | VVTQ-J98 | Services impacted after power/cooling issue – Australia East | Power or cooling | No | not stated | Australia East | Starting at approximately 08:41 UTC on 30 August 2023, a utility voltage sag was caused by a lightning strike on electrical infrastructure approximately 18 miles from the impacted Availability Zone of the Australia East region. |
| 2023-07-06 | XMGF-5Z0 | Azure Monitor – Logs data access issues | Code or update rollout | Yes | 9 h 45 min | None named | A code deployment for the Azure Container Apps service was started on 3 July 2023 via the normal Safe Deployment Practices (SDP), first rolling out to Azure canary and staging regions. |
| 2023-07-05 | FVHB-188 | Networking fiber cut – West Europe | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 8 h 38 min | West Europe | Due to a fiber cut caused by severe weather conditions in the Netherlands, 25% of network links between two campuses of West Europe datacenters became unavailable. |
| 2023-06-16 | VLB8-1Z0 | Networking connectivity issues – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 51 min | West Europe | This network topology description incorrectly listed these links as being ‘Production’. |
| 2023-06-09 | QNPD-NC8 | Azure Portal – Errors accessing the Azure portal | Load or capacity | No | 1 h 50 min | None named | However, this attack resulted in the issues mentioned above, and we have hardened our protections from the lessons we’ve learned from it. |
| 2023-03-23 | RNQ2-NC8 | Azure Resource Manager, West Europe | Code or update rollout | Yes | 5 h 10 min | West Europe | This was caused by high-volume, short-held lock contention on the request serving path, which triggered a significant increase in spin-waits against these locks, driving up CPU load and preventing threads from picking up asynchronous background work. |
| 2023-03-06 | R_36-P80 | Azure Storage – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 14 h 5 min | West Europe | While this configuration change followed the usual Safe Deployment Practices (for more details, refer to: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/devops/operate/safe-deployment-practices ), this issue was found mid-way through the deployment. |
| 2023-02-07 | VN11-JD8 | Multi-service outage, Asia-Pacific Area | Power or cooling | No | 1 d 8 h 11 min | Southeast Asia, East Asia | Power management systems managed the voltage dip as designed, however a subset of chiller units that provide cooling to the datacenter tripped and shut down. |
| 2023-01-31 | BS81-390 | Service management issues – East US 2 | Load or capacity | No | 19 h 3 min | East US 2 | Each of these AZs are further internally sliced into partitions, to ensure that a failure in one partition does not affect the processing in other partitions. |
| 2023-01-25 | VSG1-B90 | Azure Networking, Global WAN issues | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 35 min | None named | This unqualified change led to a chain of events which culminated in the widespread impact of this incident. |
| 2023-01-23 | 7NBR-T98 | Intermittent networking issues – South Central US | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 3 h 59 min | South Central US | During this incident, a single router in the RNG experienced a hardware fault, causing a fraction of network packets to be dropped. |
| 2023-01-23 | 2TFR-NC0 | Azure Synapse Analytics – West Europe | Power or cooling | Yes | 15 h 40 min | West Europe | We determined that an issue occurred during a planned power maintenance, causing an incident for a subset of storage and networking infrastructure in one datacenter of one Availability Zone in West Europe. |
| 2023-01-18 | 6S_Q-JT8 | Single zone power event, West Europe | Power or cooling | Yes | 3 h 26 min | West Europe | While all server racks have redundant dual feeds, one feed was powered down for maintenance, and a failure in the redundant feed caused a shutdown of the affected racks. |
| 2022-11-02 | YTGZ-1Z8 | Enrolling new certificates / Provisioning new resources – Azure Public / Government / China | Latent bug, no change named | No | 1 d 5 h 13 min | None named | Due to a latent performance bug in the RA, inadvertently introduced in the past month as part of a feature enhancement, the rate of new incoming requests was greater than the rate at which requests could be processed from the queue. |
| 2022-10-26 | JKWW-JP8 | Azure Cosmos DB – East US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 35 min | East US | A change to the front-end gateway of Azure Cosmos DB, to include additional diagnostic information, was introduced on the affected cluster earlier this month. |
| 2022-09-07 | 3TPC-DT8 | Azure Cosmos DB – North Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 7 h 31 min | North Europe | Our frontend load balancing procedure had a regression that did not factor in the effect of a reduction in available cluster capacity, due to ongoing maintenance. |
| 2022-09-07 | YV8C-DT0 | Azure Front Door – Connectivity Issues | Third party or attack | No | 3 h 45 min | None named | The first two spikes were successfully absorbed due the platform protection mechanisms, however the ones that were initiated during the third spike did not fully mitigate the unexpected increase due to the nature of the traffic pattern (different from the first two spikes). |
| 2022-08-30 | 2TWN-VT0 | Canonical Ubuntu issue impacted VMs and AKS | Third party or attack | No | 1 d 10 h | None named | The manifestation of this bug was triggered due to the combination of this and a previous update. |
| 2022-08-27 | MMXN-RZ0 | Datacenter power event – West US 2 | Power or cooling | No | 23 h 13 min | West US 2 | In the first datacenter, impact was caused when a small number of server rack level Uninterruptible Power Supply (RUPS) systems failed to stay online during the transition to generator, creating a momentary loss of power to the servers. |
| 2022-08-18 | YLBJ-790 | Azure Key Vault – Provisioning Failures | Load or capacity | Yes | 9 h 52 min | None named | During the incident, a backend service that Azure Key Vault relies on, became unhealthy due to an unexpected spike in traffic during scheduled hardware maintenance, which caused a build-up of requests in the queue, resulting in high latencies to fulfil new certificate creation requests. |
| 2022-08-12 | YTYN-5T8 | Azure Communication Services – Multiple Regions | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 9 h 17 min | None named | This change in database capacity inadvertently exposed a latent code bug for the resource provider, which resulted in a functional difference in the number of database results being returned against what could be processed by the resource provider. |
| 2022-07-29 | 7SHM-P88 | Network Connectivity Issues | Load or capacity | No | 5 h 20 min | Brazil South, Canada Central, East Asia, East US, East US 2, France Central, Japan East, Korea Central, North Central US, South Africa North, South Central US, Southeast Asia, West Europe, West US | While the event was detected immediately and automated remediation was triggered, the substantial increased bursts of traffic occurring throughout the event affected the ability of automated mitigations to continue providing the necessary relief to the network. |
| 2022-07-21 | 3TBL-PD8 | SQL Database – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 9 h 43 min | West Europe | An operator error led to an incorrect action being performed in close sequence on all four persisted metadata caches. |
| 2022-06-29 | YKDK-TT8 | Wide Area Network – Multiple Regions | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 17 h 34 min | None named | On this single faulty router, only four of its 140 physical ports had a physical failure, which was causing a section of the router to malfunction intermittently without producing an actionable error message. |
| 2022-06-28 | YVTL-RS0 | Azure Software Load Balancer – Multiple Regions | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 d 22 h 34 min | None named | Upon investigating this issue, we identified a change in our latest code deployment which caused some MUX instances to store the backend DIPs in a different order. |
| 2022-06-14 | 3V1K-5D8 | Azure Front Door – Connectivity Issues | Power or cooling | No | 4 h 29 min | None named | The electrical transients were introduced by anomalous component behavior within Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) modules, and cascaded throughout the datacenter electrical distribution system including electrical power supply to the mechanical cooling plant. |
| 2022-06-07 | NMB2-ND0 | Datacenter cooling event – East US 2 | Power or cooling | No | 11 h 49 min | East US 2 | The electrical transients were introduced by anomalous component behavior within Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) modules, and cascaded throughout the datacenter electrical distribution system including electrical power supply to the mechanical cooling plant. |
| 2022-05-31 | YL23-V90 | Azure Active Directory Sign In logs | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 12 h 19 min | None named | As part of continuous service improvements, a recent change to the underlying infrastructure that was intended to optimize performance, inadvertently caused the observed impact. |
| 2022-04-08 | Y__5-9C0 | Service Management Operation Errors Across Azure Services in East US 2 | Load or capacity | No | 1 d 2 h 15 min | East US 2 | The underlying issue was a retry storm triggered by the zonal failure of a related Allocator service. |
| 2022-03-16 | TTCR-NTZ | Azure AD B2C, Authentication Failures and Error Notifications | Load or capacity | Yes | 1 h 9 min | None named | The service experienced a significant increase in workload in the affected region during a planned maintenance operation. |
| 2022-03-01 | ZNRZ-HDG | Azure Resource Manager – Service Management Operation Failures | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 d 15 h 19 min | None named | A configuration change was applied to these backend components, which resulted in some instances of the ARM service becoming unreachable, causing errors for a subset of operation requests. |
| 2022-02-16 | 9TDP-N8G | SQL Database and App Service – West Europe | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 8 h | West Europe | Due to a memory hardware failure in a network router, a control plane/data plane synchronization process in that router failed during a regular automated maintenance operation. |
| 2022-02-12 | SL1P-TSZ | Azure SQL DB and Cosmos DB Unavailable | Latent bug, no change named | No | 2 d 23 h 58 min | None named | A race condition in the underlying Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism caused the network control plane channel in some cases to not pick up the rotated certificate, leading to connectivity failures once the certificate expired. |
| 2022-02-02 | SMWW-BDZ | Azure AD – Service Management Failures | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 16 min | None named | As part of planned maintenance, a change to a dependency was rolled out which affected the availability of the Azure AD REST API service. |
| 2022-01-13 | 8V39-P9Z | Azure Resource Manager – Issues with management and resource operations | Code or update rollout | Yes | 1 d 11 h | West US, West US 2, South Central US, North Europe, West Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia | A code modification which started rolling out on 6 Jan 2022 exposed a latent defect in the infrastructure used to process long running operations (informally, “jobs”). |
| 2022-01-04 | 9VT8-HPG | Azure Cosmos DB – East US | Latent bug, no change named | No | 19 h 11 min | East US | Service Fabric uses the ring topology, and each node establishes a lease relationship with nodes in its proximity (i.e. neighborhood) to detect failure. |
| 2021-12-16 | S_3M-FZZ | Azure Active Directory – Experiencing sign in issues when attempting to access Azure, Dynamics 365, and/or Microsoft 365 Services | Code or update rollout | Yes | 1 h 25 min | None named | In this case, due to a gap in the backend service’s health monitoring, the update rollout was not stopped until all redundant endpoints were impacted. |
| 2021-12-13 | 8T9M-T9G | Azure Data Factory V2 – West Europe | Latent bug, no change named | No | 6 h | West Europe | Retry logic from ADF, coupled with this unhealthy service, resulted in a rare combination of transient conditions and lead to additional errors. |
| 2021-12-09 | SNCJ-9ZG | Errors connecting to SCM App Service and/or Azure Functions deployments | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 23 min | None named | However, due to a misconfiguration, this change incorrectly affected the name resolution for App Service SCM endpoint, which resulted in a subset of our customers not being able to connect to the SCM endpoints of the service. |
| 2021-11-16 | SVT2-VCZ | Azure Active Directory – Issues when attempting to authenticate | Latent bug, no change named | No | 2 h 40 min | None named | The engineering team has determined that an underlying code defect triggered some service nodes to experience a shortage of outbound ports to complete network tasks. |
| 2021-11-09 | DK83-BDZ | Intermittent Failures When Accessing or Using Access Panel | Code or update rollout | Yes | 5 h 25 min | West Central US, Central US | After we failed to detect this bug through testing, it was discovered during telemetry validation in the first deployment stage in West Central US, at which point we failed over traffic from West Central US to Central US at 07:00 UTC to prevent customers from experiencing this discovered bug. |
| 2021-10-13 | 0NC_-L9G | Virtual Machines | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h 15 min | None named | Using this information, the VM Agent will update itself to the latest version in the VM. |
| 2021-08-11 | 0MQY-NPG | Connection errors for resources leveraging Azure Front Door and Azure CDN | Code or update rollout | Yes | 3 h | Japan East, Japan West, Korea South, Korea Central, West US | A subset of edge locations in Korea, Japan, and West US were running with stale TLS resumption keys, and the rolled-out update triggered the mechanism to prevent the reuse of stale keys. |
| 2021-07-28 | LNZM-TZG | Azure Network Infrastructure service availability issues – Brazil Southeast | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 32 min | Brazil Southeast | We determined that a degradation in connectivity was caused by packet loss when the metadata on one of our regional-level routers was updated incorrectly. |
| 2021-07-23 | 5TGJ-1SZ | Service availability issue – Brazil South | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 28 min | Brazil South | During this maintenance activity, a technician was executing a change that impacted the incorrect set of cables. |
| 2021-07-21 | 4LRL-V8G | Azure Cognitive Services | Code or update rollout | Yes | 6 h 55 min | None named | Our investigation revealed that this issue was triggered by a pending (deployed, but awaiting reboot) OS security update which had introduced a networking change on the updated clusters. |
| 2021-07-21 | 4VWK-LPZ | Azure Cognitive Services – Azure Government | Code or update rollout | Yes | 6 h 55 min | None named | Our investigation revealed that this issue was triggered by a pending (deployed, but awaiting reboot) OS security update which had introduced a networking change on the updated clusters. |
| 2021-07-12 | 0TYG-DPG | Azure Front Door and Azure CDN – Connectivity issues and increased latency | Code or update rollout | Yes | 4 h 55 min | East US | Peak traffic increase in the busiest metropolitan areas on Monday morning in the USA initiated the incident due to the reduced capacity caused by regression. |
| 2021-07-07 | 0_JL-9SG | Service management operation failures – North Europe | Code or update rollout | Yes | 14 h 51 min | North Europe | The issue was triggered by a platform update on the servers running the disk management service. |
| 2021-06-29 | 1V9K-PSZ | Azure Resource Manager – Degraded Performance managing resources | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 16 h 6 min | None named | The connection to some of these backend storage endpoints started failing after a maintenance to update their configuration was deployed. |
| 2021-06-14 | LL1H-9CZ | Error notifications for service management operations – West US 2 | Load or capacity | No | 13 h 15 min | West US 2 | Additionally, resources hosting this service became unavailable due to a code defect in a driver. |
| 2021-05-20 | KN22-39Z | Issues accessing the Azure portal and other Microsoft services | Code or update rollout | Yes | 9 h 28 min | None named | The regression introduced lock contention issues which, when triggered, caused some processes on our edge servers to go into a paused state and stop serving traffic for some time. |
| 2021-04-20 | HNS6-1SZ | Intermittent 503 errors accessing Azure Portal | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 41 min | UK South, UK West | The Azure portal frontend resources in UK South was taken out of rotation for maintenance the previous day, at 2021-04-19 19:08 UTC. |
| 2021-04-01 | GVY5-TZZ | DNS issue impacting multiple Microsoft services | Load or capacity | No | 39 min | None named | In this incident, one specific sequence of events exposed a code defect in our DNS service that reduced the efficiency of our DNS Edge caches. |
| 2021-03-18 | 5LJ1-3CZ | Azure Key Vault – Intermittent failures | Load or capacity | No | 3 h 15 min | West Europe, North Europe | This was triggered by a surge of requests to the Data Plane for a specific type of resource which resulted in excessive operations to access the backend storage and over-utilization of network resources as a result of a code defect. |
| 2021-03-15 | LN01-P8Z | Authentication errors across multiple Microsoft services | Latent bug, no change named | No | 14 h 37 min | None named | This exposed a bug where the automation incorrectly ignored that “retain” state, leading it to remove that particular key. |
| 2021-03-09 | 8NVQ-HD8 | Argentina and Uruguay – Issue Accessing Azure Resources | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 16 min | None named | A regional networking fiber cut resulted in a brief loss of connectivity to Microsoft resources. |
| 2021-02-26 | PLWV-BT0 | Azure Storage and dependent services – Japan East | Load or capacity | No | 6 h 36 min | Japan East | This was due to: Incorrect limits set on the scale unit which allowed more load than desirable to be placed on it. |
| 2021-02-16 | ZN8_-VT8 | Azure Frontdoor – Europe – Timeouts connecting to resources | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 1 h 30 min | None named | Engineers determined that a backend network device became unhealthy, and traffic was not automatically rerouted. |
| 2021-02-12 | CVTV-R80 | Azure Cosmos DB connectivity issues affecting downstream services in West US region | Code or update rollout | Yes | 5 h 7 min | West US | On February 11, 10:04 UTC (approximately thirteen hours before the incident impact), a Cosmos DB deployment was completed in West US using safe deployment practices; unfortunately, it introduced a code regression that triggered at 23:11 UTC, resulting in the customer impact described above. |
| 2020-12-14 | PS0T-790 | Azure Active Directory – Authentication errors | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 19 min | None named | The thread contention happened on the scale unit due to a particular combination of requests and a recent change in service topology for the scale unit rolled out previously. |
| 2020-10-27 | 8SHB-PD0 | Azure Active Directory B2C – North Europe / West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 30 min | North Europe, West Europe | In the North Europe/West Europe regions a configuration change was compounded by a surge in traffic which exceeded the regions’ operational thresholds and required the Azure AD B2C Service to be augmented. |
| 2020-10-19 | ZLXD-HT8 | Azure Resource Manager – Issues accessing Azure resources via ARM | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 13 min | None named | During integration testing and in the early phases of the rollout, in-line with safe deployment practices, the deployment did not show any problems or regression. |
| 2020-09-28 | SM79-F88 | Authentication errors across multiple Microsoft services and Azure Active Directory integrated applications | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 h 58 min | None named | In this case, the SDP system failed to correctly target the validation test ring due to a latent defect that impacted the system’s ability to interpret deployment metadata. |
| 2020-09-18 | SMSC-FS0 | Azure Storage Premium File Shares – East US | Code or update rollout | Yes | 8 h 21 min | East US | The incident started when a small number of clients entered an invalid state, triggered by a combination of a routine network maintenance operations which happened on the storage scale unit at the time and a code bug on the client side. |
| 2020-09-14 | CSDC-3Z8 | Connectivity Issues – UK South | Power or cooling | Yes | 11 h 11 min | UK South | It took approximately 120 minutes for the team to diagnose the root cause and begin to remediate the mechanical plant issues, with cooling being restored at 15:45 UTC. |
| 2020-09-03 | 8KLC-1T8 | Network Latency Issue, West Europe | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 8 h 11 min | West Europe | Separately, between 09:21 and 09:26 UTC a significant fiber-cut occurred approximately 5 kilometres from the data centre on one one of the other paths between the data centers. |
| 2020-08-14 | 9MDM-TT8 | Degraded connectivity to Microsoft Services within the Southeast region of the United States | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 1 h 10 min | None named | The initial fiber path incident occurred on 13 Aug 2020 at 18:34 UTC due to a fiber cut causing the path to be removed from Microsoft’s Global Network. |
| 2020-07-18 | TTPY-3P0 | Azure DNS – Connectivity issues | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 55 min | None named | The decommissioning of a legacy (preview) DNS solution inadvertently caused some data streams for Azure DNS recursive resolver service to become out of sync with the resolver state. |
| 2020-07-07 | 8S8J-9T8 | Virtual Machines – Virtual machine unexpected restarts | Code or update rollout | Yes | 10 d 13 h 52 min | None named | We determined that an ongoing OS update deployment task inadvertently contained a code configuration error that resulted in a number of previously addressed bug fixes being reverted on a subset of clusters. |
| 2020-07-01 | CLCK-LD0 | Azure SQL Database – Japan East | Load or capacity | No | 1 h 51 min | Japan East | A specific network traffic pattern combined with a networking stack configuration on the SQL Gateway instances triggered an imbalance on the CPU processing of new connection requests. |
| 2020-06-14 | PMHH-NS0 | Azure Active Directory – Authentication Errors | Load or capacity | No | 2 h 40 min | None named | An unexpected increase in traffic volume and resource utilization of infrastructure in the region responsible for acquiring authentication tokens resulted in regional contention which exceeded operational thresholds; resulting in authentication issues for a subset of customers. |
| 2020-06-11 | 9VHK-J80 | Storage – East US | Power or cooling | Yes | 2 h 23 min | East US | Engineers determined that an incident during a planned power maintenance activity at the datacenter caused an impact to a single storage scale unit, which then became unhealthy. |
| 2020-06-04 | DLZG-7C0 | Azure Resource Manager – Failures creating or deleting resources | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 9 h 12 min | None named | Due to this wrong setting, the ARM status query for networking service management operations failed, which customers saw as failures when attempting to create or delete networking resources. |
| 2020-05-19 | 8K76-LZ8 | SQL and Open-Source Database Service Management Issues – East US | Latent bug, no change named | No | 3 h | East US | The bug was encountered in all the service instances of the region leading to failures and timeouts for management operations. |
| 2020-05-18 | SLN3-HD0 | Multiple Services – Central India | Power or cooling | No | 19 h 49 min | Central India | At 11:25 UTC, a power issue with the regional utility power provider caused a Central India datacenter to transfer to generator power. |
| 2020-04-22 | TS66-1C0 | Managed Database services – UK South | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 17 min | UK South | The primary instance of the data service became unhealthy preventing some of the service management operations from completing. |
| 2020-04-22 | ZK36-9P8 | Managed Database services – China North | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 17 min | China North | The primary instance of the data service became unhealthy preventing some of the service management operations from completing. |
| 2020-03-15 | SMR4-D90 | Service Availability Issue in West Central US | Power or cooling | No | 4 h | West Central US | At approximately 20:30 UTC on 15 Mar 2020, an ice storm in the region resulted in a loss of power to both primary and secondary utility power feeds in West Central US. |
| 2020-03-05 | SND4-L80 | Service Management/Authentication Errors – Azure China | Third party or attack | No | 19 h | None named | It caused clients to fail certificate validation, which in turn caused failure in connecting to Azure services. |
| 2020-03-03 | 9SS0-VT8 | Issues connecting to resources in East US | Power or cooling | No | 6 h 30 min | East US | Although the cooling system has N+1 redundancy, the automation failure resulted in a significant reduction in cooling air flow. |
| 2020-02-28 | DMP0-HT8 | Networking Issue in South Central US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h 22 min | South Central US | This configuration triggered a conflict with an existing backend service configuration and caused an increase in the failure rate of requests to the service used for service discovery. |
| 2020-02-22 | CT05-PC0 | MSA Login Failures | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 41 min | None named | Engineers determined that a server authentication component reached an operational threshold which resulted in increased failures and the unavailability of the service metadata required for successful user sign-in. |
| 2020-02-21 | CTH0-HZ8 | Networking – Intermittent Connectivity | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 36 min | West Europe, Southeast Asia | The incident was caused by a configuration error pushed to routers in Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN), in Singapore and Amsterdam. |
| 2020-01-30 | 0KYQ-PP8 | Authentication issues for Microsoft Government Cloud resources | Code or update rollout | Yes | 4 h 58 min | None named | There was a code defect in the incremental/delta synchronization pipeline which left the applications in an incorrect state in US Government service regions. |
| 2020-01-25 | 5TYQ-DC0 | SQL Database and dependent services – Service Availability Issues | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 10 h 15 min | None named | Engineers determined that a recent maintenance activity did not complete successfully which in-turn caused the gateways to hold an incorrect certificate configuration that effectively blocked connections to the associated SQL resources. |
| 2020-01-24 | 4_YR-FC8 | Cross-Region Connectivity Issue – North America | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 25 min | None named | Incompatible FIB pushes that caused failure on part of the routers resulted in FIB rollbacks. |
| 2020-01-20 | 0TSQ-TT0 | Azure connectivity issues | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 1 h 29 min | None named | Traffic to/from the internet towards Microsoft automatically shifted to other Edge sites in Europe, but the change in path and increase in traffic caused longer latency for some customers. |
| 2019-12-27 | 4_6S-NC8 | Unable to create new resources in Azure Portal | Code or update rollout | Yes | 1 h 20 min | None named | Customers were unable to create new resources in the Azure Portal due to a code change that was introduced which caused a key extension to fail, causing a null-reference within the Marketplace blade. |
| 2019-12-12 | HKZT-N88 | Connectivity issue for Azure Resources in North America | Third party or attack | No | 6 h 41 min | None named | Engineers identified a routing protocol metric change within an ISP backbone network, which resulted in network connectivity degradation for a limited subset of Azure customers. |
| 2019-12-11 | LTPP-R98 | Azure CDN and Azure Kubernetes Service – Service Availability Issue | Third party or attack | No | 1 h 24 min | None named | A recent change to Verizon’s deployment pipeline introduced a latent bug that caused some deployment service health notifications to provide incorrect health status. |
| 2019-11-20 | archive | Multiple Services – Downstream impact from Azure Front Door | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 h 44 min | None named | Investigation into the faulting behavior revealed that the combination of a sequenced code deployment, a configuration deployment and specific traffic patterns triggered a dormant code bug that instigated the platform to crash. |
| 2019-11-07 | archive | Storage – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 8 h 15 min | West Europe | A bug in this process resulted in backend roles crashing across the scale units participating in the load balancing operations, causing them to become unhealthy. |
| 2019-11-05 | archive | Azure Databricks – Unable to connect to workspaces | Load or capacity | No | 1 h 15 min | None named | This restart was caused by high CPU usage attributed to other unrelated services sharing the same node. |
| 2019-11-05 | archive | Virtual Machines and Storage – West US 2 | Latent bug, no change named | No | 2 h 57 min | West US 2 | A software bug in the code that tracks the progress of those operations caused the processes on the metadata nodes to crash and restart. |
| 2019-11-04 | archive | Azure SQL Database – West Europe | Latent bug, no change named | No | 6 h 30 min | West Europe | Subsequent investigation by engineers determined this issue was due service requests from an internal Azure group that triggered a bug which caused an excessive number of internally generated operations. |
| 2019-10-30 | archive | Storage – West Europe | Latent bug, no change named | No | 3 h 35 min | West Europe | In this incident, a unique sequence of circumstances triggered a previously unknown software bug that impacted a single storage scale unit. |
| 2019-10-29 | archive | Virtual Machines and Azure Databricks | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h 35 min | None named | An incorrect network configuration change was rolled out via an automated workflow which unintentionally targeted multiple production regions. |
| 2019-10-22 | archive | Service Availability – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 8 min | West Europe | A routine maintenance operation on one of the partitions caused an inconsistency in the partition map due to a bug. |
| 2019-10-21 | archive | Service Management Errors – East US 2 | Load or capacity | No | 13 h 29 min | East US 2 | The increased latency triggered retries on the Regional Network control plane service (RNM), which then went into a feedback loop, causing operations to queue up and forced the Regional Network Manager (RNM) into a state where it was not able to recover. |
| 2019-10-21 | archive | Storage – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 12 min | West Europe | A routine maintenance operation on one of the partitions caused an inconsistency in the partition map due to a bug. |
| 2019-10-18 | archive | Authentication issues with Azure MFA in North America | Third party or attack | No | 2 h 27 min | None named | This combination of events caused a build-up of unprocessed requests in the MFA service, leading to service degradation and failures in MFA requests. |
| 2019-10-16 | archive | Azure Portal | Load or capacity | No | 1 h 14 min | UK South | Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the underlying deployment and management service for Azure, providing the management layer that allows create, update, delete, etc. functions for the platform. |
| 2019-09-30 | archive | Storage – Unable to access Azure file share with Azure Active Directory Domain Services joined machines | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 d 11 h | None named | However, a step was missed in this change which caused Azure Files to fail when authenticating with Azure Active Directory Domain Services. |
| 2019-09-25 | archive | Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – Provisioning Failures | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 7 h 35 min | None named | This update exposed a code defect for the service and a fix for the defect had yet to complete in the impacted regions. |
| 2019-09-16 | archive | Azure Front Door Service and Azure CDN | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 d 30 min | None named | Engineers determined that a recent deployment task impacted Key Vault API calls, causing the provisioning failures. |
| 2019-09-11 | archive | Australia East – Intermittent Connectivity | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 10 min | Australia East | During a routine configuration update to a single ring, a health check failed, causing the configuration update to automatically roll back. |
| 2019-08-28 | archive | Azure Email Alerts | Load or capacity | No | 5 h 13 min | None named | During scale up operations the service became unresponsive due to logging operations exceeding thresholds. |
| 2019-08-23 | archive | Service Management Operations – West/North Europe | Load or capacity | No | 4 h 26 min | North Europe, West Europe | This should have initiated a clearing process which attempts to recover additional memory when thresholds are reached. |
| 2019-08-16 | archive | Azure Services – South Central US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 7 h 20 min | South Central US | However, an error in fiber trunk validation resulted in production impacting connectivity loss. |
| 2019-08-14 | archive | USGov Iowa – Service Availability and Downstream Impact | Load or capacity | No | 8 h 35 min | US Gov Iowa, US Gov Virginia | A secondary issue was detected on review that was causing the build-up of the number of nodes requiring non-automated or manual repair. |
| 2019-08-09 | archive | Azure Portal – Issues Loading Dashboard Tiles | Code or update rollout | Yes | 3 h 10 min | None named | The issue was caused by a code change that introduced a bug in an underlying API that the affected experiences relied on. |
| 2019-08-08 | archive | Azure CDN – Connectivity Issues | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 4 h 55 min | East US, East US 2 | Engineers determined that a network update to add new peer servers to the US East region caused connections to fail between Akamai CDN and Azure resources. |
| 2019-07-30 | archive | Issues logging in to the Azure Portal with a Microsoft Account | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 1 h 24 min | None named | It was determined that combination of factors including a device mismatch and code bug, resulted in the active device becoming unstable. |
| 2019-07-08 | archive | Azure Active Directory – Password Changes | Code or update rollout | Yes | 4 h 23 min | None named | Engineers determined that a recent deployment of a certificate caused backend instances responsible for password change functionality to reject the password change operation. |
| 2019-07-04 | archive | Connectivity Issues – UK South | Load or capacity | No | 10 h 7 min | UK South | During the last two weeks of June, the customer traffic on a single storage scale unit in the UK south region had increased more quickly than normal, and the automatic load balancing system had responded by beginning to shift load to other scale units. |
| 2019-07-03 | archive | Azure Monitoring (Diagnostic logs, Autoscale, Classic Alerts (v2)) | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h | None named | As part of service engineering improvements, a configuration change was incorrectly applied to the underlying KeyVault resources which are used by Azure Monitor’s management services (Autoscale, Classic Alerts, Diagnostic Settings) during start up. |
| 2019-07-02 | archive | Azure Services – Intermittent Service Availability Issues | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 3 h | None named | One of the network devices in San Jose had a hardware grey failure at 19:20 UTC, causing traffic going to one of Microsoft peer networks to experience intermittent failures. |
| 2019-06-14 | archive | Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks (Management) – North Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 13 min | North Europe | The rollout of the bad configuration information to the SLB servers was not automatically stopped and rolled back by the Azure Deployment system as the SLB monitoring and alerting components did not determine this was an incorrect and undesirable configuration. |
| 2019-05-22 | archive | Service Management Operations – West Europe | Latent bug, no change named | No | 5 h 50 min | West Europe | Prolonged operational delays triggered a RNM bug which caused the primary replica to re-build on two occasions. |
| 2019-05-13 | archive | Network Connectivity – Increased Latency | Latent bug, no change named | No | 6 h 28 min | None named | The impact was the result of inconsistent data replication in a networking infrastructure service. |
| 2019-05-02 | archive | Network Connectivity – DNS Resolution | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 6 min | None named | A misconfiguration in the parameters of the automation being used to make the change resulted in an incorrect delegation for the name server under maintenance. 2) As an artifact of automation from prior maintenance, empty zone files existed on servers that were not the intended target of the assigned delegation. |
| 2019-05-02 | archive | Azure Map | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h 25 min | None named | Upon investigation, engineers found that the authentication application was inadvertently removed in error during regular maintenance operations. |
| 2019-04-19 | archive | Availability degradation for Azure DevOps | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 11 h 50 min | None named | During a planned maintenance event for Azure Front Door (AFD), a configuration change caused network traffic to be incorrectly advertised. |
| 2019-04-16 | archive | Networking Degradation – Australia Southeast / Australia East | Third party or attack | No | 50 min | Australia Southeast, Australia East | The issue stemmed from a routing anomaly due to an erroneous advertisement of prefixes received via an ExpressRoute circuit to an Internet Exchange (IX). |
| 2019-04-12 | archive | Cognitive Services | Code or update rollout | Yes | 9 h 40 min | West Europe, West Central US | Engineers determined a recent deployment introduced a software regression, manifesting in increased latency across two regions. |
| 2019-04-09 | archive | Virtual Machines – North Central US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 8 h 41 min | North Central US | This situation was designed to be handled with fallback to our existing data path, but an additional bug led to failure in the fallback path and resulted in in VM reboots. |
| 2019-03-29 | archive | SQL Database | Code or update rollout | Yes | 5 h 20 min | East US, UK South, West US 2 | Deployments in Azure follow the Safe Deployment Practice (SDP), which aims to ensure deployment related incidents do not occur in many regions at the same time. |
| 2019-03-28 | archive | Data Lake Storage / Data Lake Analytics | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 13 min | East US 2, West Europe, Japan East | An engineer made changes to the global partition.config file for the identified regions and triggered deployment using the process described above. |
| 2019-03-27 | archive | Service Management Failures – West Europe | Load or capacity | No | 1 d 2 h 10 min | West Europe | Root Cause: Regional Network Manager (RNM) is a core component of the network control plane in Azure. |
| 2019-02-27 | archive | USGov Virginia – Service Availability | Power or cooling | Yes | 2 h 12 min | US Gov Virginia | During routine electrical equipment maintenance at a datacenter, the equipment responsible for load transfer to our redundant power source failed, causing temporary power loss to a subset of racks and devices within the US Virginia data center. |
| 2019-02-22 | archive | Virtual Machines (Classic) | Code or update rollout | Yes | 3 h 32 min | None named | Engineers established that a platform service update introduced this regression that surfaced only at high incoming traffic volume. |
| 2019-02-20 | archive | SQL Services – West Europe | Latent bug, no change named | No | 7 h 35 min | West Europe | Logic that selects a ring, a unit of capacity within a region, to place a service instance during creation or SLO change could incorrectly pick the same overloaded ring for incoming placement operations. |
| 2019-02-18 | archive | Erroneous Browser Warning – Azure Germany Portal | Third party or attack | No | 3 h 10 min | None named | The URL login.microsoftonline.de was incorrectly classified as an unsafe site due to an operational error, resulting in impact. |
| 2019-02-11 | archive | Azure Kubernetes Service – East US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 7 h 5 min | East US | Engineers determined that during a recent deployment of new capacity to the backend services responsible for managing deployments and maintenance on customer clusters encountered an error. |
| 2019-02-08 | archive | Azure IoT Hub | Latent bug, no change named | No | 5 h 56 min | None named | Engineers found that one of the SQL queries automatically started using a bad query plan causing the SQL DB to start consuming a significantly large percentage of database transaction units (DTUs). |
| 2019-01-30 | archive | Intermittent Network Related Timeouts – West US | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 h 40 min | West US | A network device in the US West region experienced a FIB/Linecard problem during a routine firmware update. |
| 2019-01-29 | archive | Network Infrastructure Event | Third party or attack | No | 3 h 10 min | None named | Root Cause: An external DNS service provider experienced a global outage after rolling out a software update which exposed a data corruption issue in their primary servers and affected their secondary servers, impacting network traffic. |
| 2019-01-10 | archive | Storage and Dependent Services – UK South | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 16 h 11 min | UK South | Unfortunately in this incident, the unique nature of the problem, combined with the number of subsystems affected and the interactions between them, led to a longer than usual time to root cause and mitigate. |
| 2019-01-08 | archive | Azure DevTest Labs – Virtual Machine Error Message | Code or update rollout | Yes | 1 d 8 h 22 min | None named | Engineers determined that an issue within a recent Azure Portal UI deployment task caused impact to customer resource error messaging and operations. |
| 2018-12-14 | archive | Networking – UK West | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 8 h 55 min | UK West | Engineers determined that an external networking circuit experienced a hardware failure impacting a single fiber in this region. |
| 2018-12-04 | archive | Networking – South Central US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 4 min | South Central US | Two network devices in the South Central US region received an incorrect configuration during an automated process to update their configuration and firmware. |
| 2018-11-27 | archive | Multi-Factor Authentication | Not determined | No | 20 min | None named | This outage was caused by a Domain Name System (DNS) failure which made the MFA service temporarily undiscoverable and a subsequent traffic surge resulting from the restoration of DNS service. |
| 2018-11-26 | archive | Virtual Network – UK South and UK West | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 5 h 37 min | UK South, UK West | A 16 minute hardware failure on a WAN router caused a large amount of traffic to failover from the primary path out of the region to the backup path, causing increased congestion on the backup path. |
| 2018-11-19 | archive | Issues connecting to Azure resources in Europe, Asia and the Americas regions using Multi-Factor Authentication | Code or update rollout | Yes | 13 h 59 min | None named | The second root cause is a race condition in processing responses from the MFA backend server that led to recycles of the MFA frontend server processes which can trigger additional latency and the third root cause (below) on the MFA backend. 3. |
| 2018-11-11 | archive | Storage – West US | Third party or attack | No | 10 h 7 min | West US | It started when a route configuration at one of the regional internet service providers caused traffic to get re-routed incorrectly and drop. |
| 2018-10-24 | archive | Networking in West US | Hardware, fiber or network device | Yes | 1 h 23 min | West US | A network device connecting a datacenter in the West US region experienced a fault during routine fiber maintenance. |
| 2018-10-16 | archive | Azure Service Availability – France Central | Power or cooling | Yes | 2 h 48 min | France Central | While working on the system, the maintenance engineer inadvertently triggered the fire alarm for this Colo, which in normal circumstances would have alerted staff, but would not have caused any impact to running services in the Colo. |
| 2018-10-13 | archive | Storage – East US | Load or capacity | No | 5 h 50 min | East US | Unexpectedly, a small number of the failed roles did not recover automatically. |
| 2018-10-11 | archive | App Service – East Asia | Latent bug, no change named | No | 26 min | East Asia | The Microsoft Azure team identified the issue was due to a dependency that the Web App service takes on Azure Storage. |
| 2018-10-08 | archive | Service Bus – East US and West US | Code or update rollout | Yes | 1 d 4 h | East US, West US, East US 2 | On this incident, that condition was triggered when the Service Bus VMs received the monthly OS Patch. |
| 2018-10-02 | archive | ExpressRoute Circuit – Australia Southeast | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 3 h 45 min | Australia Southeast | It was identified that an upstream physical port experienced a partial failure causing the connection between the ExpressRoute routers and the Microsoft global network to intermittently drop packets. |
| 2018-09-26 | archive | Multiple Services – Southeast Asia | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 2 h 36 min | Southeast Asia | The flapping behavior of the console ports triggered a bug in the console line driver of the Operating System kernel running on the 8 row-level network switches, and caused a correlated failure of all 8 row-level switches. |
| 2018-09-15 | archive | Virtual Machines – Metrics Unavailable | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 d 16 h 5 min | None named | When the VIP was failed over, the agent did not properly detect and re-establish connectivity to the functioning instance during the maintenance period. |
| 2018-09-15 | archive | Metrics Missing – Germany | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 d 16 h 5 min | None named | When the VIP was failed over, the agent did not properly detect and re-establish connectivity to the functioning instance during the maintenance period. |
| 2018-09-05 | archive | Azure Active Directory – Multiple Regions | Code or update rollout | Yes | 4 d 20 h 50 min | East US 2 | A recent change to the Azure VM platform resulted in interference with the HTTP settings used by the Azure Active Directory (AAD) proxy service. |
| 2018-09-04 | archive | South Central US | Power or cooling | No | not stated | South Central US | By design this sag triggered the chillers to power down and lock out, to protect this equipment. |
| 2018-05-03 | archive | Multiple Services – West Central US | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 18 min | West Central US | In this incident, the Management ACLs were incorrectly applied in some network switches due to the differences in how ACLs are interpreted between different operating system versions for the network switches. |
| 2018-04-26 | archive | App Service – Canada Central | Load or capacity | No | 43 min | Canada Central | The root cause for the issue was that there was a significant increase in HTTP traffic to certain sites deployed to this region. |
| 2018-04-15 | archive | Issues Performing Service Management Operations – Australia East/Southeast | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 6 h 20 min | Australia East, Australia Southeast | A storage infrastructure configuration change as part of a new deployment resulted in an authentication failure. |
| 2018-04-09 | archive | Azure Active Directory B2C – Multiple Regions | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 h 8 min | None named | Due to a regression introduced in a recent update in our data storage service that was applied to a subset of our replicated data stores, data objects were moved to an incorrect location in a single replicated data store in each of the two impacted scale units. |
| 2018-03-20 | archive | App Service and App Service Linux – Multiple Regions | Code or update rollout | Yes | 2 h 58 min | None named | The root cause of the issue was a software bug introduced in a specific API call during a recent platform update. |
| 2018-03-19 | archive | SQL Database – West Europe | Code or update rollout | Yes | 23 h 30 min | West Europe | The specific point was due to a combination of factors & heavy load on the region, a bug causing an increase in the size of the image being downloaded, and a pre-existing configuration mismatch on a small set of scale units in the region. |
| 2018-03-01 | archive | Microsoft Azure Portal | Load or capacity | No | 7 h 20 min | West Europe, North Europe, UK South | Upon investigation, engineers determined that the scale out operation in North Europe did not complete successfully due to ongoing deployment in that region. |
| 2018-02-20 | archive | Multiple Services – UK South | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 3 h 14 min | UK South | After the detailed investigation, engineers confirmed that the Datacenter power hardware operated as expected, without any unexpected gap in power supply, as this issue was initiated by the commands executed during build-out. |
| 2017-10-07 | archive | Infrastructure issue impacting multiple Azure services – Australia East | Power or cooling | Yes | 27 min | Australia East | During a planned facility power maintenance activity, power was removed from a single feed. |
| 2017-09-29 | archive | Storage Related Incident – North Europe | Power or cooling | Yes | 6 h 48 min | North Europe | When suppression was triggered, it initiated the automatic shutdown of Air Handler Units (AHU) as designed for containment and safety. |
| 2017-09-04 | archive | ExpressRoute \ ExpressRoute Circuits – Washington DC | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 5 h 49 min | None named | A routine maintenance was being conducted on the Microsoft Network in the Washington DC area. |
| 2017-05-18 | archive | Storage Latency – West Europe | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 13 h 14 min | West Europe | To increase capacity on aggregation routers, a routine maintenance was performed to deploy configuration updates. |
| 2017-05-12 | archive | Network Infrastructure – East US | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 35 min | East US | A failed line card on a network device combined with fiber damage to a second device caused customer impairment. |
| 2017-05-10 | archive | Intermittent Authentication Failures due to Underlying Azure Active Directory issues | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 40 min | None named | Unfortunately, this process was not closely followed resulting in an unintentional configuration change being rolled out to the Azure Active Directory production services. |
| 2017-05-04 | archive | Virtual Machines – Japan East | Latent bug, no change named | No | 40 min | Japan East | Unfortunately in this incident the combination of the above and a higher than normal request load on the cluster, exposed a rare software bug which resulted in the failure of storage roles on several additional nodes. |
| 2017-03-25 | archive | Intermittent Authentication Failures due to Underlying Azure Active Directory Issue | Latent bug, no change named | No | 3 h 12 min | None named | This caused the backend of the STS to become overwhelmed and resulted in timeouts and requests being dropped. |
| 2017-03-23 | archive | Data Lake Analytics and Data Lake Store, East US 2 | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 2 h 23 min | East US 2 | A misconfiguration in one of the microservices that ADLS depends on caused the ADLS microservices to not serve requests after they, or the instances they resided on restarted (which restart is part of regular maintenance process). |
| 2017-03-22 | archive | Increased latency accessing Azure resources | Power or cooling | No | 1 h 22 min | East US | Due to severe weather in the Atlanta, Georgia, one of the 3rd party peering sites experienced an infrastructure event resulting in loss of cooling. |
| 2017-03-21 | archive | Storage and Virtual Machines – West Europe | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | not stated | West Europe | Due to the failure of an optical line card, network operational thresholds were reduced in West Europe. |
| 2016-12-11 | archive | for Network Infrastructure in West Europe | Hardware, fiber or network device | No | 1 h 16 min | West Europe | We encountered a software issue on our network routers that caused routing calculations to take longer than expected during a fiber issue in West Europe. |
| 2016-12-07 | archive | for Storage in North Europe affecting Multiple Services | Latent bug, no change named | No | 2 h 48 min | North Europe | The system then enters into failsafe mode resulting in a pause of any data deletion actions on data tagged for deletion (Garbage Collection) until the replicas are again available, the system exits failsafe mode, and the service is fully recovered. |
| 2016-11-30 | archive | Traffic Manager impacting Multiple Services | Configuration or operational change | Yes | 20 min | None named | A misconfiguration resulted in inbound routing failure through one of the devices critical to the path of the Traffic Manager services. |
| 2016-11-21 | archive | Microsoft Azure Portal, Errors using Azure Resource Manager to create Virtual Machines | Code or update rollout | Yes | 6 h 5 min | None named | Unfortunately the change had a side effect and caused a failure while validating the location of VM at a creation. |
“archive” links open the Internet Archive capture where we found a review that is no longer on Microsoft’s page. Dashes inside quotes are shown as commas.
Is Azure down? How to check
A history cannot tell you about right now, but the reviews show where Microsoft actually communicates during an incident.
- Start with Azure Service Health in the portal. Microsoft’s documentation says incidents are communicated to affected subscriptions through Service Health, and that the PIR for a narrower incident goes only to affected customers there. Set up Service Health alerts to email, SMS or a webhook into your PSA.
- Then check the public status page. azure.status.microsoft is used for three scenarios only: broad impact across multiple services in a full region or several regions, an issue that blocks access to the portal or Service Health, or broad impact Microsoft cannot yet scope. A quiet status page does not mean your subscription is unaffected.
- Look for the Tracking ID. Every review carries one (such as YKYN-BWZ). It ties the Service Health notice, the status page and the final review together, and you can open a review directly with
azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status/history/?trackingId=ID. - Expect two reviews. Microsoft says it endeavors to publish a preliminary PIR within 3 days of mitigation and a final PIR after its internal retrospective, generally within 14 days.
- Know what the page leaves out. Microsoft 365 has its own status channels; 21 of the 219 Azure reviews mention Microsoft 365 or Office 365, usually because a shared dependency such as Entra ID or Front Door failed.
How Microsoft decides what gets a public review
The counts above depend on publishing rules that changed twice, and Microsoft states them at the top of the history page.
Two consequences matter for anyone counting outages. First, the yearly count fell from 28 reviews in 2020 to 15 in 2023, 14 in 2024, 13 in 2025 and 10 so far in 2026. Because the rule narrowed in June 2022, that drop says nothing on its own about reliability. Second, the page is not append-only: Microsoft removes Scenario 3 entries after sending the final review through Service Health, and it removes everything after five years. Google publishes under a similar rule, as our Google Cloud outage history shows.
What this means for MSPs
Most Azure outages start with a change, so watch Microsoft’s change cadence. 58% of reviews trace back to a configuration push, rollout or maintenance step. Global services such as Front Door, Entra ID and Resource Manager have failed everywhere at once: 45 reviews in those families name no single region. For client workloads, that argues for a second path that does not share the failing service: an alternate DNS or CDN route in front of Front Door, and break-glass admin accounts that do not depend on a single sign-in path.
Availability Zones help with power, not with global services. 11 of the 14 power or cooling reviews since June 2022 describe a single-zone event, and several say zone-redundant services, such as zone-redundant Azure SQL Database, kept running. Two did not stay in one zone: the August 2022 West US 2 utility outage hit the whole region, and the May 2026 storms reached two zones. And 42% of reviews name no single region, and no zone or region choice protects against a global control-plane fault. Match the design to the risk, and price it against the downtime terms in each provider SLA, which our 99.9% uptime calculator breaks down.
Wire Service Health into your ticketing, per tenant. Since June 2022 most incident reviews never reach the public page. If you manage many tenants, each one needs Service Health alerts routed to your PSA, or you will learn about incidents from your clients. Keep the Tracking ID in the ticket so you can attach the final review to your client report.
Plan for the long tail. The median window is 5 h 45 min, but power events run a median 8 h 32 min, and recovery of dependent services often continues after Microsoft declares mitigation. Runbooks that assume a one-hour blip will fail in exactly the incidents that matter.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an Azure outage today?
This page is a history, not a live monitor. For current status, check azure.status.microsoft, which Microsoft uses only for broad issues across multiple services and regions, and Azure Service Health in the portal, where Microsoft sends most incident notices to affected subscriptions. The most recent review in our casebook covers a networking gateway incident on September 30, 2026.
What was the biggest Azure outage?
By impact window, the longest review in our casebook is a July 2020 virtual machine restart issue that ran 10 d 13 h 52 min. By reach, the Azure Front Door incident of October 29, 2025 stands out: it lasted 8 h 24 min and hit customers and Microsoft services worldwide. The July 18, 2024 Central US storage incident ran 1 d 20 min.
What causes Azure outages?
In 127 of the 219 reviews (58%), the incident began with something Microsoft changed: a configuration push, a code or OS update, maintenance work, or a migration. Power and cooling failures account for 25 reviews, hardware and fiber faults for 22, and load surges for 23.
How long do Azure outages last?
The median impact window across 215 reviews with a stated start and end is 5 h 45 min. For the 78 reviews on Microsoft’s current history page it is 8 h 24 min. Power and cooling events run longest, with a median of 8 h 32 min.
Which Azure region has the most outages?
West Europe is named in 34 of the 219 reviews, more than any other region. But 92 reviews (42%) name no single region because the fault was global or spanned many regions, as with Azure Front Door.
How do I check Azure outage history?
Microsoft’s status history page lists post incident reviews for broad issues and keeps each one for five years, so entries older than late 2021 have dropped off. We rebuilt the older record from Internet Archive captures. Our full casebook of 219 reviews can be downloaded below.
Methodology
Sources. Microsoft Azure status history, every entry from the page’s own history endpoint (statushistoryapi, all services, all regions, all dates), pulled on October 13 and October 29, 2026; 101 Internet Archive captures of the history page at azure.microsoft.com (2016 to 2019), status.azure.com (2019 to 2023) and azure.status.microsoft (2022 to 2026), spaced at least 20 days apart; Microsoft Learn, “Azure status overview” (status page criteria).
What counts as a review. An entry titled RCA or Post Incident Review, or whose text contains a final root-cause section (“Root cause:” or “What went wrong and why?”). Preliminary notes without a root cause, and entries saying only that analysis would follow, are excluded. Entries are deduplicated by Tracking ID, or by date and normalised title before Microsoft added Tracking IDs in 2019 to 2020; one duplicate RCA (November 19, 2018 MFA) was removed. 141 of the 219 reviews come only from archive captures. Coverage before November 2021 is incomplete because captures exist for some months only and older pages showed a short window.
Root-cause coding. One category per review, for the event that started the incident, assigned by reading the root-cause section: configuration or operational change (including maintenance, migrations, decommissioning and capacity work), code or update rollout (including OS, firmware and certificate deployments), latent bug with no change named, load or capacity, power or cooling, hardware, fiber or network device, third party or attack (ISPs, vendors, DDoS), or not determined. “Began with a Microsoft change” is true for the first two categories and for physical events Microsoft says started during its own maintenance. Where a customer action triggered a latent bug (Front Door, October 29, 2025), the review is coded as a latent bug and not as a Microsoft change. Judgement calls are ours; the codes are in the CSV.
Windows and regions. The impact window is the first stated window in the review’s opening summary (“Between … and …”), converted to UTC (EST, EDT and US Central times for Azure Government; China Standard Time, UTC+8, for Azure in China). 4 reviews state no end time. Regions are Azure region names found in the title and opening summary.
Limitations. Microsoft decides what gets a public review, and the rule changed in 2019 and 2022, so yearly counts measure publishing as much as reliability. The casebook says nothing about incidents communicated only through Service Health. Not advice.
Cite as:The Uptime Report. "Azure Outage History: 127 of 219 Microsoft Post Incident Reviews Began With Microsoft's Own Change." October 2026. https://theuptimereport.com/azure-outage/
References
- Microsoft Azure, Azure status history (all entries via the page’s history endpoint). Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Learn, Azure status overview (status page scenarios and PIR publishing). Accessed October 2026.
- Internet Archive, captures of azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/history/, 2016 to 2019. Accessed October 2026.
- Internet Archive, captures of status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/, 2019 to 2023. Accessed October 2026.
- Internet Archive, captures of azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status/history/, 2022 to 2026. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR YKYN-BWZ, Azure Front Door, Connectivity issues across multiple regions, October 29, 2025. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR QNBQ-5W8, Azure Front Door, Access issues in multiple regions, October 09, 2025. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR 1K80-N_8, Storage, Impact to multiple services in Central US, July 18, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR GHRP-84G, Multiple services, Power/cooling issues in West US 2, May 29, 2026. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR _SVS-5_G, Power event impacting multiple services, West US, February 07, 2026. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR FNJ8-VQZ, Virtual Machines, Managed identities for Azure resources, and dependent services, Service management issues in multiple regions, February 02, 2026. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR VN11-JD8, Multi-service outage, Asia-Pacific Area, February 07, 2023. Accessed October 2026.
- Microsoft Azure, PIR LN01-P8Z, Authentication errors across multiple Microsoft services, March 15, 2021. Accessed October 2026.
Research library
More original data reports from The Uptime Report. Every report includes its methodology and a free CSV download. Browse all research
Threats and breaches
- Hypervisor Vulnerabilities
Hypervisor CVEs vs exploitation - DMARC Adoption Statistics 2026
DMARC enforcement, 15,000 domains - RMM Vulnerabilities and Remote Access Flaws
RMM and remote access flaws in KEV - Identity Theft Statistics 2026
ID theft per 100K by state and type - Scam Statistics 2026
FTC fraud losses by channel and age - VPN Vulnerabilities by Vendor
VPN gateway KEV and CVEs by vendor - MFA Statistics 2026
MFA methods across 2,571 services - Password Statistics 2026
12,674 passwords tested against HIBP - Ransomware Groups 2026
Most active ransomware groups, ranked - Ransomware Statistics 2026
Leak-site victims by month since 2021 - Malicious npm Packages
Malicious npm packages, day by day - Cybersecurity Statistics 2026
70 sourced stats, every number traced - Zero-Day Statistics
Every tracked zero-day since 2014 - Phishing Statistics 2026
Four phishing measures, one evidence board - Patch Tuesday Statistics 2026
Every Microsoft CVE since 2021 - Disaster Declarations by State
FEMA data for continuity planning - Data Breach Statistics 2026
980 breaches in Have I Been Pwned - Ransomware Initial Access Vectors
CISA advisories coded by entry technique - CVE Statistics 2026
Vulnerabilities published per year, NIST NVD - How Long Do Companies Take to Report a Data Breach?
1,675 Washington notices - Known Exploited Vulnerabilities
The CISA KEV catalog analyzed - Healthcare Data Breach Report 2026
HHS OCR breach portal scorecard - Ransomware Reported to the FBI
Five-year IC3 trend
Infrastructure and uptime
- Microsoft 365 Market Share 2026
Who runs email: Microsoft vs Google - CrowdStrike Outage
July 19, 2024 outage, minute by minute - Data Center Electricity Prices 2026
Power prices vs data center load, by state - Average Internet Bill 2026
Home internet prices by speed and state - Search Engine Market Share 2026
Search share since 2009, by country - ChatGPT Market Share 2026
AI chatbot referral share, every tracker - Google Cloud Outage History
Google Cloud incidents by product, 2013 on - Data Center Water Usage 2026
Water by site, company and drought - AI Energy Consumption 2026
Big Tech electricity vs US demand - SSD Prices 2026
NAND price cycle from makers’ filings - RAM Prices 2026
DRAM prices from producers’ filings - Domain Name Statistics 2026
Domains by TLD, renewals, registrars - Linux Market Share 2026
Linux desktop share, every headline traced - GitHub Outages
GitHub incidents by month since 2020 - Cloudflare Outage History
Every Cloudflare outage post-mortem - Starlink Statistics 2026
Satellites, subscribers, coverage, outages - Internet Access Statistics 2026
Home internet gaps by state and group - SQL Server End of Life
SQL Server support countdown + CVEs - Windows 11 Market Share 2026
Windows 10 vs 11 share by country - Cloud Computing Statistics 2026
Hyperscaler revenue and capex, SEC data - AWS Outage History
Every AWS Post-Event Summary since 2011 - Data Centers by State 2026
Sites, jobs, power for every state - Data Center Statistics 2026
Data center power, spending, jobs - 99.9% Uptime
Uptime calculator and 35 real SLAs - Power Outage Statistics by State
Outage hours by state, EIA data - Cost of Downtime
Revenue per hour for 3,001 public companies - Windows Server End of Life
Support dates and CVEs per server version
Regulation and disclosure
- FedRAMP Statistics 2026
FedRAMP authorizations, GSA data - Item 1C Cybersecurity Disclosures
What 600 10-Ks say in Item 1C - CMMC Certification Statistics 2026
CMMC demand vs assessor capacity - Data Brokers List 2026
728 brokers across three state registries - SEC Cybersecurity Incident Disclosures
Every 8-K Item 1.05 filing - HIPAA Enforcement Tracker
Every OCR penalty and settlement
Workforce and pay
- AI at Work Statistics 2026
Worker AI use: ever, weekly, daily, by job - Network Engineer Salary 2026
Network engineer vs admin pay, BLS - IT Manager Salary 2026
IT manager pay by industry, BLS OEWS - Software Engineer Salary 2026
Developer pay by metro, BLS OEWS - H-1B Statistics 2026
H-1B lottery, employers, and wages - AI Layoffs 2026
AI-blamed job cuts, sourced to filings - Help Desk Salary 2026
Help desk hourly pay, BLS OEWS - Cybersecurity Salary 2026
Security pay percentiles, BLS OEWS - Women in Tech Statistics 2026
Women’s share of tech jobs since 2011 - IT Unemployment Rate 2026
Tech vs national jobless rate, monthly - Tech Job Postings 2026
Tech postings vs 2020, by role and country - Tech Layoffs 2026
Tech layoffs from state WARN notices - Remote Work Statistics 2026
Telework by job, industry, and state - Highest Paying Cities for IT Jobs 2026
Metro pay by role, BLS OEWS - The Tech Job Market in 2026
Openings, quits, hires, layoffs - IT Salaries by State 2026
Pay matrix for four IT roles - IT and Cybersecurity Jobs Outlook 2026
BLS employment projections
MSP market and spending
- Microsoft 365 Price Increase 2026
Every M365 price change, vs inflation - Computer Prices 2026
Computer price indexes and HS 8471 imports - MSP Market Size 2026
Managed services market, built from Census - Small Business AI Adoption 2026
AI use by firm size, sector, state, Census - Cyber Insurance Statistics
Cyber insurance market, NAIC 2015-2024 - IT Spending by Industry
IT investment by industry, BEA - IT Services Industry Growth 2026
Census revenue by service industry - IT Hourly Rates 2026
Hourly IT labor rates, GSA contracts - VoIP Statistics 2026
Business VoIP vs landlines, FCC - MSP Industry Statistics 2026
Jobs, wages, and firms, BLS QCEW - Federal IT Spending 2026
IT services contracts, USAspending - IT Services Firms by State
Census business patterns atlas
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