Microsoft Azure powers a significant portion of the world’s cloud services, making its uptime and reliability critical for businesses of all sizes. In this article, we did an overview of the largest Azure outages over the past five years.
We analyzed each event by the number of affected regions, impacted components, and overall downtime duration.
While this five-year snapshot provides valuable insights, it’s only a fraction of the full picture. StatusGator users have access to the history of Microsoft Azure outages going back over 10 years, enabling DevOps, IT, and incident response teams to trace patterns, assess long-term service availability, and better prepare for future service issues.
By tracking every change to the Azure status page, StatusGator provides a reliable view of Azure status history, including when a service issue begins, updates throughout its lifecycle, and the eventual post-incident review.
Combined with service health alerts, users can receive real-time notifications that help reduce downtime and limit customer impact.
January 9, 2025: Azure East US2 Networking Outage Disrupts Key Services
The issue began around 02:38 UTC and affected multiple core services, including Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Functions, App Service, and Virtual Machines.
Microsoft initially reported partial service degradation and began rerouting traffic away from the affected zone. While customers using non-zonal services began to see improvements early on, zonal services faced a prolonged recovery period.
Over the next 48 hours, several services experienced a cycle of fluctuating status changes between degraded and operational as mitigation efforts progressed.
Among the most affected components were:
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Servers, which saw status changes more than 20 times over the two-day period.
- Azure Container Apps and Azure Databricks, which oscillated in availability throughout the incident.
- Network Infrastructure, a critical component, was only fully restored more than 24 hours after the initial event.
By January 11, Microsoft declared the incident resolved across all services.
December 26, 2024: Azure Downtime in South Central US due to Power Incident
At 18:44 UTC, Microsoft Azure experienced a major service disruption in its South Central US region due to a power incident in Availability Zone 03 (AZ03).
The issue affected multiple core services, including Storage Accounts, Virtual Machines, App Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Log Analytics, Azure Arc, Application Gateway, and Azure Firewall.
Customers across various services reported increased storage latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors, leading to widespread performance degradation.
Although power was restored by 20:43 UTC, full recovery was delayed. Lingering issues with storage infrastructure required the manual replacement of some network components. Microsoft advised impacted customers to fail over to another Availability Zone or region where possible.
Recovery efforts continued into December 27, with most services returning to normal operations by midday, although some services required extended mitigation.
November 13, 2024: Azure DNS Issue Causes Databricks and Storage Disruptions Across Multiple Regions
Starting at approximately 01:13 UTC, Microsoft Azure experienced DNS resolution failures affecting connectivity to Azure Storage services.
As a result, customers encountered failures when attempting to perform management operations on Azure Databricks clusters and serverless compute resources, including actions such as creating, stopping, and updating clusters.
At 03:03 UTC, status changes across multiple Azure regions indicated degraded service for Azure Databricks, including East US, East US 2, Central US, South Central US, West US, West US 2, Canada Central, Australia East, Japan East, and UAE North.
Shortly after, at 03:43 UTC, similar warning-level degradations were reported for Storage Accounts in the same regions, with the West Europe joining at 04:58 UTC.
Azure engineering teams began investigating immediately and posted intermittent updates. The final status update was logged at 04:55 UTC, though service health indicators remained in a warning state for several more hours.
By 09:53 UTC, Azure restored services across all affected regions, returning both Azure Databricks and Storage Accounts to an operational state.
January 25, 2023: Global Azure Networking Disruption
Microsoft Azure experienced a widespread networking disruption starting at approximately 07:30 UTC. This event affected connectivity across multiple regions globally, including East US, West Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia East, and over 25 other regions.
The issue impacted network infrastructure, resulting in degraded performance or connectivity issues for a subset of Azure users. Affected services reported elevated latency or intermittent network failures.
By 08:29 UTC, the issue remained under investigation, and a “warning” state persisted across all impacted regions.
By 10:53 UTC, Azure’s status reflected improvement, with most services returning to operational status, though some residual warnings lingered as full recovery progressed.
January 18, 2023: Disruption of Azure Storage in the West Europe due to Power Outage
Microsoft Azure experienced a significant outage affecting a broad range of services in the West Europe region. The incident began at approximately 07:44 UTC and was fully resolved by 13:23 UTC.
The root cause was a power event that impacted a subset of racks within a storage scale unit in one of Azure’s West Europe data centers.
This unexpected power disruption caused a drop in availability for certain storage clusters.
As a result, customers experienced elevated latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors when accessing data stored in affected Storage Accounts.
Since many Azure services depend on storage, the impact cascaded to services such as Azure Virtual Machines, SQL Database, Cognitive Search, Backup, Application Insights, and others.
While most services automatically recovered through built-in mechanisms, a portion of affected resources required manual intervention by Microsoft engineers.
Recovery progressed throughout the day, with most customers seeing improvements by mid-morning. Full restoration across all impacted services was confirmed by early afternoon.
June 29, 2022: Massive Multi-Region Azure Firewall and Data Explorer Outage
On June 29, 2022, at 17:18 UTC, Microsoft Azure experienced a widespread and prolonged disruption. It impacted Azure Firewall and Azure Data Explorer, along with related services such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Backup, Azure Cognitive Search, and Azure Stream Analytics.
This incident affected dozens of regions globally, including major areas like East US, West US, Central US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, India, South Africa, and the Middle East.
Nearly every Azure region reported degraded performance or availability for one or more services, with Azure Firewall and Data Explorer experiencing the brunt of the issue.
The outage was especially disruptive due to multiple waves of WARN and UP status changes over the span of 24 hours. While services briefly recovered around 03:13 UTC on June 30, they entered a WARN state again just 30 minutes later, and this pattern repeated throughout the day.
Customers relying on these core Azure components for real-time analytics, firewall protections, search capabilities, and backups were particularly vulnerable.
The frequent toggling between degraded and recovered states likely caused automation failures, degraded app performance, and broken service dependencies across Azure-hosted systems.
The incident was finally resolved by 17:13 UTC on June 30, after nearly 24 hours of intermittent service instability.
June 1, 2022: Azure AD Sign-In Logs Disruption Affects Monitoring and Insights
On June 1, 2022, at approximately 01:03 UTC, Microsoft issued a warning regarding issues with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Sign-In logs.
The disruption, though not a full service outage, significantly affected telemetry and observability tools. The affected regions included North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, India, UAE, South Africa, Brazil, and more, covering both regional and non-regional services.
The incident primarily impacted Azure AD, Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Monitor components such as Log Analytics and Application Insights, and Azure Resource Manager.
As these tools are foundational for monitoring user activity, performance, and security events, many customers were unable to access crucial diagnostics or telemetry data during the incident.
Critical services like Sentinel and Application Insights were partially degraded in dozens of data centers, while global log analytics visibility was significantly reduced.
Microsoft resolved the issue and restored full functionality by 10:23 UTC, nearly 9.5 hours later.
April 1, 2021: Global DNS Outage Disrupts Multiple Microsoft Services
On April 1, 2021, at approximately 22:28 UTC, Microsoft reported a widespread DNS issue. It disrupted connectivity across multiple Azure regions and services.
The problem was rooted in Azure’s network infrastructure layer, causing failures in service resolution and access to Azure resources.
Impacted regions spanned the globe, including East US, West US, Central US, Canada, Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, Australia, and Brazil, indicating the severity and scope of the outage.
The Microsoft team began mitigating the issue within an hour, and by 23:28 UTC, recovery efforts were underway.
A subsequent update at 23:58 UTC confirmed that the recovery was progressing and undergoing validation.
The DNS-related disruption affected a broad set of services due to their dependency on core network resolution services.
While the incident was marked with a WARN status rather than a full outage, its global footprint and impact across critical services made it one of the more notable infrastructure incidents of 2021.
February 12, 2021: Azure Cosmos DB Disruption Cascades Across Dependent Services in North America
Beginning at 00:30 UTC, customers in the East US and West US regions encountered connectivity issues to Cosmos DB resources. This outage didn’t remain isolated, as multiple Azure services rely on Cosmos DB for backend operations.
The impact quickly expanded to include services such as Azure IoT Hub, Event Grid, Synapse Analytics, Automation, Backup, Media Services, and even Azure Front Door and the Microsoft Azure Portal.
Microsoft issued guidance for impacted users to failover to unaffected regions, including Central US, North Central US, and South Central US.
Engineering teams deployed mitigations, and by 1:43 UTC, most services had begun recovering. Still, Microsoft continued monitoring the platform to ensure full restoration.
This outage served as another example of how tightly coupled Azure services can create cascading failures when foundational platforms like Cosmos DB experience trouble, especially in core regions like East and West US.
January 25, 2020: Global Azure SQL Dependency Disruption Impacts Core Networking Services
A backend dependency failure in Azure SQL Database triggered widespread WARN status across Azure’s networking stack, including Application Gateway, Azure Bastion, and Azure Firewall.
The outage began at approximately 5:53 AM. The disruption affected nearly every Azure region globally, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. Government and Department of Defense clouds.
These services, which depend on Azure SQL for backend management operations, experienced service degradation, though core traffic routing and firewall enforcement largely remained intact.
The issue was fixed nearly 6 hours later, bringing affected regions back to full operational health.
Stay Ahead of Azure Service Issues with StatusGator
Understanding the history of Microsoft Azure outages is essential for teams that rely on its infrastructure. But what matters most is staying ahead of future service issues.
That’s where StatusGator comes in. As both a status page aggregator and status page provider, StatusGator consolidates status data from Azure and hundreds of other services into a single, unified platform.
Designed for DevOps and IT teams, it offers powerful tools like Early Warning Signals, which analyze past and present status page changes to alert users to emerging service issues, even before official incidents are declared. One of the latest issues with Azure AI services continued for nearly 9 hours on Apr 9, 2025. Even though Microsoft never acknowledged the downtime, StatusGator users received an alert.
Whether you’re monitoring Azure service health, setting up service health alerts, or simply trying to reduce customer impact, StatusGator gives you the actionable insights and historical visibility you need across all your cloud services.So go ahead and monitor Azure status and other 5,000+ cloud services statuses – try StatusGator for free.
FAQ
Where can I find the Azure outage history?
Azure outage history is available at the official Azure status page. It provides real-time updates and historical incident details. However, it only shows limited historical data. For a complete Azure status history going back over 10 years, you can use StatusGator, which monitors and archives every status change and service issue across all Azure regions and services.
How much downtime does Azure have per year?
Microsoft Azure aims for high availability across its services. For example, a 99.9% uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement) means the service can be unavailable for up to:
- 43.8 minutes per month
- 8.77 hours per year
These SLAs apply to core services like virtual machines, storage, and databases, and actual downtime varies by region and service tier. Learn more about Azure downtime per year with StatusGator, which offers 10 years of historical events. Also, you can review Azure service downtime that was not officially acknowledged by Microsoft, providing you with additional visibility into Azure downtime.
What happens if an Azure region goes down?
If an Azure region experiences an outage, services in that region may become partially or fully unavailable. Azure typically redirects traffic or workloads to another region, depending on the configuration. For maximum resiliency, Microsoft recommends using availability zones, which are physically separate locations within an Azure region. To be among the first to learn whenever an Azure region goes down, try StatusGator for instant notifications and early warning signals of the upcoming disruptions.
