Microsoft Azure Front Door (AFD), the content delivery network (CDN) that serves as the entry point for many services such as Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud management portals for advertising, was affected by a global issue on Wednesday, but as of Thursday the system was back up and running. 

Cloud services have become a revenue driver for technology companies, and a staple for clients. Many services across multiple industries depend on cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- two companies that recently experienced an outage.

When outages pause services and ad campaigns, wasting advertising spend and potentially causing financial losses, this leads to challenges. The growth of Google Cloud services, for example, drove up revenue by 34% year-over-year (YoY) in Q3 to about $15.2 billion.

For its full fiscal year 2025, Microsoft's Azure Cloud platform generated more than $75 billion in revenue, up 34% from the previous year.

Cisco ThousandEyes, which monitors the health of platform across the internet, a few minutes before noon on Wednesday detected that HTTP timeouts, server error codes, and elevated packet loss occurred at the edge of Microsoft's network, preventing connections that frequently timed out or returned service-related errors. 

Advertisers were unable to access the Microsoft Advertising console through its web user interface for several hours. The company confirmed the issue, and that its engineering team worked quickly to resolve the downed services. 

Navah Hopkins, Microsoft Ads Liaison, confirmed the outage in a post on LinkedIn. Similar to Google, Microsoft has a status page to check outages.

Microsoft reported that Azure came back online a little after 8 p.m. Eastern yesterday. Even then, Microsoft warned customer configuration changes to Azure Front Door (AFD)--cloud CDN and global load-balancing service that improves the performance and security of web applications and content--would remain temporarily blocked.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Oct. 20, 2025 experienced a similar significant disruption in its on the U.S. East coast region that lasted more than 15 hours and impacted multiple services that rely on AWS including Slack, Atlassian, Snapchat, and others.

The outage affected some Google services including Gmail, YouTube, and Instagram for thousands of users who connect with AWS. While the company said Google Ads remained unaffected and operational, an advertiser told MediaPost some of the Google Ads functions, because they were tied into AWS, were affected, mainly when running reports. 

Cisco ThousandEyes said that what began as AWS' software problem -- where the outcome of an operation depends on the unpredictable timing of multiple threads or processes -- triggered a cascade of failures across multiple dependent systems.

AWS cloud failure demonstrated how one technical defect in critical infrastructure can create ripple effects throughout interconnected cloud services.

The Internet Outages Map is an at-a-glance visualization of global Internet health during the last 24 hours, tracking Internet outages across ISPs, top application providers, public clouds, and edge service networks.

The map automatically updates outage information every five minutes and shows ongoing and recently detected outages.