The outage, which began around 16:00 UTC on October 29, was traced to an “inadvertent configuration change” that disrupted DNS routing and caused widespread latency, timeouts, and authentication failures across multiple systems.

The fallout was immediate and spread wide. Core Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, Minecraft, and Azure-dependent applications, were hit. 

Companies relying on Azure infrastructure, such as Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Starbucks, Costco, Kroger, and Capital One, also reported service disruptions that left customers unable to access websites, make payments, or check in for flights.

In a statement on Azure’s status page, Microsoft confirmed the root cause of the incident:

“Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC on 29 October 2025, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors. We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue.”

Azure Front Door (AFD), which powers global content delivery and accelerates applications, became the central point of failure. The outage rippled across a long list of Azure services, including App Service, Azure SQL Database, Azure Active Directory B2C, Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Maps, and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management.

By 7:40 PM ET, Microsoft said Azure Front Door had reached “above 98% availability” and that mitigation efforts were ongoing. “We are continuing to work on tail-end recovery for remaining impacted customers and services,” the company added, estimating full recovery by 00:40 UTC on October 30.

Gaming services were also affected. Xbox users experienced connection issues, with many needing to restart their consoles to reconnect. The Xbox Support account later confirmed services were “restored to their pre-incident state.”

Elsewhere, Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines acknowledged that the Azure outage disrupted key operational systems. “We are currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites,” Alaska Airlines said, urging passengers to visit airport counters for boarding passes.

Retail chains like Starbucks, Costco, and Kroger’s websites and mobile apps were temporarily inaccessible, while some Capital One customers reported difficulty accessing banking services. In the UK, internet provider Community Fibre confirmed that “some customers may have experienced issues due to the Microsoft outage.”

The disruption coincided with Microsoft’s quarterly earnings release, during which even its main website struggled to load properly. While the company managed to restore most services by late evening, the timing of the incident worried investors and analysts about the resilience of global cloud systems.

This outage follows a similar incident just a week earlier involving Amazon Web Services (AWS), which also led to widespread internet disruptions. Analysts warn that such back-to-back failures reveal the fragility of the world’s dependence on a few centralised cloud providers.

This unscheduled downtime impacted millions of users worldwide who rely on ChatGPT for a variety of tasks, causing disruption to their workflows.

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT has garnered a massive user base exceeding 100 million. Users leverage ChatGPT for various tasks, including coding assistance, brainstorming ideas, and composing reports. 

The outage, which began around 2.30 AM ET (7.30 AM WAT), affected users globally. Reports on Downdetector, a website tracking online service outages, revealed a surge in user complaints, with peak numbers reaching around 2,300 in the US and 1,000 in the UK. 

Users attempting to access ChatGPT on the web or mobile app encountered error messages like “bad gateway” and “internal server error,” effectively rendering the service unusable.

OpenAI acknowledged the outage on its service status page. Initially, the status simply indicated that they were “investigating the issue.” Over three anxious hours later, the update changed to “continuing to work on a fix,” offering little solace to users desperately awaiting a resolution. 

Finally, after nearly six hours of disruption, OpenAI provided a glimmer of hope by announcing that they had “identified the issue and mitigating.”

As of now, OpenAI has not disclosed the root cause of the outage. While talks swirled online, it appears the issue was not a simple server malfunction. Some users theorized a difference from a similar outage in November 2023, which was attributed to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The outage greatly impacted ChatGPT’s user base, many of whom have become heavily reliant on the tool for various aspects of their work. This downtime likely provided a temporary boost to competitor chatbots like Google Bard and Microsoft Copilot, as users sought alternative solutions during the outage.

At the time of this report, ChatGPT service appears to be restored, but not yet stable. However, a clear explanation from OpenAI regarding the cause of the outage has not been given.