Azure Front Door outage takes down M365, Xbox and Azure Portal worldwide

From 15:41 UTC on 29 October to 00:05 UTC on 30 October 2025, Microsoft's Azure Front Door and Content Delivery Network suffered an outage of roughly eight and a half hours, taking down Microsoft 365, Xbox, Minecraft, Azure Portal, Outlook, Copilot and a swathe of first-party and third-party services worldwide.

Microsoft's post-incident review traced the cause to a specific sequence of customer configuration changes run across two different control-plane build versions. The incompatible metadata they produced exposed a latent bug in the data plane, which crashed during asynchronous processing. The change passed the config-protection safeguards and escaped pre-production validation, then crashed the data plane and took out AFD's internal DNS service too.

Microsoft rolled back to an edited 'Last Known Good' configuration, failed traffic away from AFD, and recovered node by node. It said the service was back above 98% availability and the majority of customers mitigated. Third-party customers including airlines, banks and retailers were caught in the blast.

After mitigation Microsoft blocked AFD customer-configuration changes, then restricted them at the ARM level until 5 November. It added a pre-canary validation stage, extended bake time, removed asynchronous processing from the data plane, and cut data-plane recovery from about four and a half hours to about one.