Microsoft is working to resolve an outage affecting its Azure Front Door content delivery network (CDN), which is preventing customers from accessing some Microsoft 365 services.
According to Redmond, the incident began around 07:40 UTC, with delays and timeouts across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East when connecting to the Azure and Entra portals.
Since then, the company's engineering teams have been restarting Kubernetes instances that were causing capacity loss across AFD instances to bring them back online.
While Microsoft has yet to disclose how many customers have been affected by this outage, the company tracks it on the Service Health Dashboard as an ongoing incident, a designation commonly used for critical service issues with noticeable user impact.
"We've restored approximately 98% of the AFD service. We're actively monitoring telemetry to confirm full recovery. In parallel, we're initiating failover for the Microsoft 365 Portal service to accelerate the restoration process," Redmond said in a recent service alert.
"Some users may also experience intermitted issues accessing some Microsoft 365 services. Users may also be unable to access their cloud PCs via the Windows app web client."
In the latest update to the official Azure status page, published at 12:33 UTC (almost five hours after the incident was acknowledged), the company says that the Azure Front Door capacity issues now affect only around 4% of the customers initially impacted.
"As we continue our mitigation efforts, we have successfully recovered 96% of impacted resources, teams are working on recovering the remaining 4% of impacted customers," Microsoft said.
On Wednesday, Redmond's teams resolved another hours-long outage preventing users worldwide from accessing Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, and the admin center.
It also resolved a similar incident in July, which was preventing Microsoft 365 admins with enterprise or business subscriptions from accessing the admin center.
Update October 09, 12:07 EDT: Microsoft says the incident has been mitigated and the affected services have fully recovered.
"We identified that the Azure front Door (AFD) service had a significant loss of capacity within the Europe and Africa regions, which resulted in impact to some of the Microsoft 365 services," the company stated in a final update on the Microsoft 365 admin center.
"The failover of the Microsoft 365 portal service is complete, and we've validated that the service has fully recovered. Some of the affected users have also confirmed resolution."
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