October 29, 2025

expert reaction to Microsoft Azure outage

Scientists comment on the Microsoft Azure cloud outage.

Dr Saqib Kakvi, from the Department of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, said:

“At approximately 16:00 UTC, Microsoft Azure reported DNS issues that lead to the degradation of some services and stated customers may have issues accessing their Azure Portals.

“There was an advisory at 17:10 UTC to not use Azure Front Door directly through the web portal but using lower level tools such as PowerShell or Command Line Interfaces. This reinforces the issue being DNS which is how websites and webservices are found.

“This is very similar to the AWS outage of last week, which was also a DNS issue.

“Given the scale of these issues and the entities involved it may be an issue of BGP, which is a protocol that works with DNS to allow discovery of webservices.

“The update at 17:17 UTC stating “an inadvertent configuration change” may support this, as BGP configuration issues have previously been known to cause such effects.

“Currently Amazon, Microsoft and Google have an effective triopoly on cloud services and storage, meaning that an outage of even part of their infrastructure can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of application and systems.

“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”

Declared interests

Dr Saqib Kakvi: No conflicts