Blog, Techs Corner

Azure outage hits UK: Microsoft 365, Xbox, and more impacted — one week after major AWS incident

Microsoft 365 tweets about downstream impact due to Azure outage, providing a link for updates.

Published: 29 October 2025, 18:30 BST
Author: AVE Services

Microsoft Azure is experiencing a major outage this evening, with widespread disruption reported across the UK and beyond. Knock-on effects include problems accessing Microsoft 365 services (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint), Xbox, and Minecraft, according to multiple live reports and trackers.

This incident lands just nine days after a large AWS outage on 20 October 2025 that affected thousands of apps and several UK organisations, highlighting the risk of concentration on a small number of hyperscale providers

What’s happening now

  • Scope: A significant Azure issue is degrading access to Microsoft services (including Microsoft 365) and gaming platforms (Xbox/Minecraft). Early reports point to problems tied to Azure’s global delivery/network edge, with Microsoft rolling back changes and rerouting traffic.

  • Who’s affected: Users and businesses across the UK and internationally are reporting login failures, timeouts, and portal/admin center unavailability. Some UK ISPs and enterprises are also flagging issues.

  • Official status: Microsoft’s Azure status page is the authoritative source for incident confirmation and updates, though during major events it may lag or become intermittently unreachable

Series of Microsoft 365 Status updates addressing access issues and infrastructure connectivity problems with ongoing resolutions.

Why this stings: the context of last week’s AWS outage

On 20 October 2025, AWS suffered a global incident that rippled across banks, government services, and consumer apps. UK institutions (including banks and HMRC’s site) experienced disruption, and analysts renewed calls to reduce single-provider dependency
AWS said service was restored the same day, but the event underscored how outages at any hyperscaler can have far-reaching effects.

What AV and events teams should do right now

  1. Check service health and admin portals: Monitor Azure/Microsoft 365 status for your tenant and key regions (UK South/UK West). Expect intermittent timeouts.Azure Status

  2. Failover critical comms: If Teams is unreliable, switch to your pre-agreed fallback (e.g., phone bridges or an alternate chat/VC platform) for show-critical coordination.

  3. Protect show control: Keep local copies of run-sheets, playlists, and signage assets. Pause non-essential changes to cloud-hosted configs until stability returns.

  4. Manage client comms: Send a short status note to stakeholders explaining the third-party outage and your mitigations.

  5. Log impacts: Record start times, affected services, and any client impacts for post-incident review and any service credits discussions.

Medium-term resilience tips

  • Multi-region + offline-first: For Microsoft 365 and storage, enable geo-redundancy and keep critical show files synced for offline access.

  • Multi-vendor strategy for comms/broadcast: Even a light-touch secondary provider can cut operational risk during vendor incidents (as seen this week and last).

  • Runbooks & drills: Rehearse “cloud degraded” scenarios so crews know the switch-overs without hesitation.

Sources & live coverage

Updated: 29 October 2025, 18:45 BST