A widespread outage has hit Microsoft 365, leaving users unable to access the admin center and other essential services that rely on Microsoft Entra ID for authentication. This disruption, which began on Thursday, October 9, 2025, is causing significant access issues for organizations worldwide that depend on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite. The impact is extensive, affecting anyone trying to log into the Microsoft 365 admin center or authenticate through Microsoft Entra ID, a core dependency for many services. This dependency means that critical applications like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint may be inaccessible to end-users. Microsoft has confirmed it’s investigating reports from users who can’t access these services and is currently reviewing service pathways to find the source of the failure.
The inability to access the admin center is a major problem for IT administrators, as it prevents them from managing their environments or troubleshooting user issues. Microsoft’s investigation has pinpointed an issue within the Azure Front Door (AFD) service as the primary cause of the outage. This service is responsible for routing traffic to Microsoft’s web applications globally, and its malfunction is leading to intermittent access problems for the Microsoft 365 admin portals. The failure in AFD is believed to be having a cascading effect, contributing to the wider impact on all services that use Entra ID.
In response, Microsoft’s engineering teams are reviewing recent changes made to the AFD environment that may have triggered the disruption. The company is currently analyzing extensive diagnostic data to isolate the exact cause of the issue and understand how the failure occurred. As the investigation progresses, Microsoft’s focus has shifted to the load-balancing infrastructure within its environment. Load balancers are vital for efficiently distributing network traffic across multiple servers, and a fault in this system could explain the intermittent connectivity issues and access failures that have been reported.
Microsoft has stated it is actively working on mitigation strategies to resolve the underlying problem and restore service as quickly as possible. The company has a goal to get services back online as soon as they can. They are working on a fix to the issue as fast as they can.
Microsoft has committed to providing an update on the situation on Thursday, October 9, 2025, at 5:30 PM GMT+5:30, as engineers continue their efforts to find a resolution.
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