Azure: Third Global Outage in a Month

On August 5th, Microsoft's Azure cloud service experienced another outage that affected Azure Front Door CDN services in North America and Latin America.

A few hours after the outage, the services were restored. Nevertheless, the outage on August 5 was the third outage in the last month. The first outage, which occurred on July 19, 2024, was caused by a defective security software update from CrowdStrike. The next outage was caused by an incorrect patch. Together, these three failures are considered the largest outage sequence in history, and for Microsoft, this means a blow to its reputation.

In the United Kingdom, customers reported errors when connecting to Azure services (including Azure DevOps), and the Azure DevOps status page indicated that users in Brazil were also affected. The Downdetector website received thousands of reports of problems connecting to servers and logging in, although the Service Health Status page did not indicate any problems with Azure throughout the outage.

Last week, Microsoft also faced a longer outage. It was caused by a DDoS attack targeting several Azure Front Door and CDN sites.

DDoS attacks may continue shortly, and businesses whose infrastructure is hosted on Azure should take this factor into account in their operations.