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Microsoft's Azure cloud network experienced a major disruption Wednesday, leaving Xbox Live users unable to access online services and affecting platforms including Office 365 and Minecraft.
The outage, which Microsoft attributed to issues with Azure Front Door—its global content delivery system—prevented users from playing multiplayer games, making purchases, or downloading content across Xbox Series X|S consoles, the Xbox app, and Xbox Game Pass.
The timing proved particularly unfortunate for game developer Obsidian Entertainment, whose title The Outer Worlds 2 launched to the general public Wednesday.
While early access had been available since the previous week, the broader release coincided with the service disruption. Obsidian Support confirmed in a tweet that all titles were unavailable for purchase or installation across all platforms, and noted the outage appeared linked to Azure service problems.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue on its Azure status page, stating engineers were investigating problems with Azure Front Door, the service responsible for routing user traffic across the company's global edge network.
When this routing system fails, requests to cloud-hosted applications—from enterprise tools to gaming servers—cannot be completed.
"We have initiated the deployment of our last known good configuration, which is expected to complete within 30 minutes," Microsoft 365 said in an update.
"As this deployment progresses, customers should begin to see initial signs of recovery. Once completed, we will begin recovering nodes and routing traffic through these healthy nodes."
The company added: "We do not yet have an ETA for full mitigation, but we will provide another update within 30 minutes, once the deployment has complete."
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Downdetector recorded thousands of user reports indicating outages across Office 365, Copilot, and Xbox Live. Minecraft, one of Microsoft's largest hosted gaming platforms, also experienced disruptions that interrupted gameplay globally.
The outage occurred hours before Microsoft's scheduled quarterly earnings release and roughly one week after Amazon Web Services suffered a similar widespread disruption.
Both incidents have renewed concerns about the concentration of internet infrastructure among a small number of large cloud providers, where a single configuration error can trigger cascading failures across multiple services.
Microsoft has not yet provided an estimated time for full service restoration.
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