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29 Oct 2025

What Caused the Microsoft Outage? Why Does This Keep Happening?


Microsoft Office Building


If you tried accessing Microsoft services this afternoon, you weren't alone in experiencing disruption. At approximately 4:40 PM GMT on 29th October 2025, Microsoft suffered a major outage affecting Azure, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and other critical services used by businesses across the UK and the world.

But here's the real concern: this is becoming a worrying pattern. So what actually happened, and why do these outages keep occurring?

What Caused Today's Microsoft Outage?

According to Microsoft's official statement, today's outage was caused by an accidental configuration change to their Azure Front Door infrastructure. In simpler terms, a routine update to Microsoft's network systems went wrong, and that error cascaded across their entire global infrastructure.

The outage affected:

  • Azure cloud services

  • Microsoft 365 and admin centre

  • Outlook email access

  • Teams collaboration tools

  • Xbox Live and Minecraft

Microsoft fixed the problem by redirecting traffic and rolling back the faulty configuration. Services gradually returned throughout the evening, but many UK businesses had already lost hours of productivity.

Why Do Major Cloud Outages Keep Happening?

If this felt like déjà vu, you're not imagining it. Recent major outages include:

  • Last week: Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down. Check out our blog on the AWS Outage here for more information.

  • July 2024: CrowdStrike update caused global Windows crashes

  • Throughout 2024-2025: Multiple public cloud disruptions

The Problem: Scale and Centralisation

Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud have become so dominant that millions of organisations worldwide depend on them. When everyone uses the same massive infrastructure, a single error affects everyone simultaneously. Today's incident is a perfect example: one configuration mistake brought down services for millions of users globally.

Complexity Creates Vulnerability

Modern cloud platforms are extraordinarily complex, with hundreds of data centres and millions of servers requiring constant updates and changes. Each change is a potential point of failure. The very architecture that makes these platforms powerful also makes them fragile.

Shared Infrastructure, Shared Risk

When you use public cloud services, you share infrastructure with millions of other users. This is efficient and cost-effective, but it means you share the risks too.

Large public cloud providers operate on their own change windows (updates and maintenance happen when they decide, not when it suits your business). You receive notifications, but you can't negotiate timing or postpone changes that might conflict with your critical business periods. Today's configuration change is a perfect example: it happened during UK business hours with no consultation or ability to opt out.

You're entirely dependent on the provider's engineers to fix issues you can't even see, with no input into when or how changes are implemented.

What This Means for UK Businesses

For businesses relying on these services, outages aren't just inconvenient:

  • Lost revenue from every hour of downtime

  • Compliance risks in regulated sectors

  • Reputation damage when you can't deliver to clients

  • Productivity loss with staff unable to work

  • Competitive disadvantage while others keep operating


People working on laptops in an office


Is There an Alternative?

The pattern is clear: relying exclusively on public cloud providers means accepting changes are out of your control. But there are alternative options.

Private Cloud Infrastructure

A private cloud gives you modern cloud computing benefits (scalability, flexibility, remote access) without sharing infrastructure with millions of others. When you control your own environment, configuration changes happen on your schedule, not a provider's predetermined window.

With a managed private cloud service provider like Nimble, changes don't just happen to you. There's a conversation. Planning takes place. Change times are agreed upon with you individually before any works or migrations are carried out. This means updates can be scheduled around your business-critical periods, not during them.

Hybrid Cloud Strategies

Many businesses use a hybrid approach, keeping critical operations on private infrastructure while using public cloud for less essential workloads. When Microsoft goes down, your core business keeps running.

How Nimble Can Help

At Nimble, we build and manage private cloud infrastructure for UK businesses that can't afford to be at the sole mercy of public cloud providers. Our solutions give you independence from public cloud outages, control over your infrastructure, UK-based data sovereignty, and 24/7 support from engineers who understand your environment.

We're not saying public cloud is always wrong, but you shouldn't put all your critical operations in someone else's hands when proven alternatives exist.

Check out our IT services to see how we can help you!

What Should You Do?

If today's outage affected your business, ask yourself:

  • Can you afford regular disruptions like this?

  • How much revenue did you lose today?

  • What would happen if the next outage lasted longer?

Another major outage will happen. The question is whether your business will be affected.

Want to explore alternatives to public cloud dependency? Contact Nimble to discuss how private cloud solutions can protect your operations from the next inevitable outage.