On August 5, 2024, Microsoft Azure experienced a significant outage that disrupted services across North and Latin America. The incident, which began around 18:22 UTC, impacted Azure Front Door (AFD) and its cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN). The company initially described the cause of the outage as a “configuration change,” which led to service interruptions for numerous customers. Azure’s status page indicated the issue was widespread, affecting multiple regions and services reliant on AFD.
By 19:25 UTC, Microsoft had rolled back the configuration change and began restoring services. However, customers continued to report difficulties, including problems accessing Azure DevOps and issues with server connections. The Azure status page itself was intermittently unavailable during the outage, complicating efforts to monitor and address the situation. The disruptions were not limited to North and Latin America but also affected users in the United Kingdom and Brazil.
This outage follows a similar incident the previous week, which had already caused significant disruptions to Microsoft 365 and Azure services globally. Microsoft later confirmed that the earlier nine-hour outage was triggered by a volumetric TCP SYN flood distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The attack targeted Azure Front Door and CDN sites, with initial DDoS protection mechanisms failing to adequately mitigate the impact due to an error in their implementation.
These recent outages are part of a series of disruptions experienced by Microsoft Azure in the past year, including issues caused by faulty configurations and targeted DDoS attacks. The recurring problems underscore ongoing challenges with Azure’s infrastructure and raise concerns about the platform’s reliability for critical business operations. Microsoft continues to investigate these incidents to enhance the stability and security of its cloud services.
Reference:
