An incident on Wednesday morning caused an outage on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, affecting customers worldwide, including Alaska Airlines, Xbox users, and Microsoft 365 subscribers.

The outage occurred just before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call and followed recent disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Alaska Airlines’ data center technology failure.

Microsoft reported that the system experienced Azure Front Door (AFD) issues starting at 9 a.m. PT, resulting in a loss of availability for some services. The company attributed the problem to an inadvertent configuration change.

Actions taken by Microsoft included blocking all changes to AFD services and rolling back the configuration to the last known good state to prevent the issue from reoccurring.

Alaska Airlines also experienced disruptions due to the Azure outage, affecting website functionality and online check-in systems. Passengers were directed to airline agents for boarding passes.

Microsoft did not provide an estimated time for resolving the outage but assured updates within 30 minutes of any developments.

By 12:22 p.m., Microsoft had deployed the “last known good” configuration, expecting full mitigation within the next four hours as the recovery process continued.

Following AWS’s detailed explanation of their recent outage caused by a software bug, Alaska Airlines attributed their outage to a failure at their primary data center, impacting travel for thousands of passengers.

The incident serves as a reminder of the criticality of robust infrastructure and proactive measures to prevent service disruptions in cloud-based systems.