Microsoft Azure is the second-largest cloud platform globally with approximately 24% market share, serving millions of customers across 60+ regions worldwide. Azure provides over 200 products including Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, Azure DevOps, Azure AD (now Entra ID), and Azure OpenAI Service. The platform is deeply integrated with the Microsoft enterprise ecosystem including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Windows Server, making it the default choice for organizations heavily invested in Microsoft technologies.
Azure outages frequently originate from Azure Active Directory (Entra ID) authentication failures, which cascade across all Azure services and Microsoft 365 products since they share the identity platform. Networking infrastructure issues in specific regions, particularly US East and West Europe, cause compute and storage unavailability. Azure DevOps pipeline failures during peak CI/CD hours, DNS resolution problems, and configuration deployment errors during maintenance windows are recurring incident patterns.
When Azure goes down, the blast radius extends beyond cloud workloads into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. An Azure AD outage simultaneously breaks Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive alongside Azure-hosted applications. Azure DevOps failures halt CI/CD pipelines for hundreds of thousands of development teams. Enterprise applications running on Azure Virtual Machines, App Service, and Azure Functions become unreachable, affecting organizations that have standardized on the Microsoft cloud stack.
Use this page to check Azure availability in real time. Azure outages are often region-specific and service-specific. Visit status.azure.com for the official per-region and per-service status dashboard. Note that Azure AD (Entra ID) outages affect both Azure services and Microsoft 365 products simultaneously.
Azure Active Directory (now Entra ID) provides authentication for both Azure cloud services and Microsoft 365 applications. When Azure AD experiences an outage, users cannot sign into Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, or any Azure-hosted application. This shared dependency means Azure identity outages have an outsized blast radius.
Both platforms offer 99.95% or higher SLAs for most services. Azure's main reliability challenge is the shared Azure AD dependency that can cascade across both Azure and Microsoft 365. AWS services tend to fail more independently. Both platforms recommend multi-region deployments for mission-critical workloads.
Check status.azure.com to identify affected regions and services. If Azure AD is impacted, existing authenticated sessions may still work while new sign-ins fail. For regional outages, failover to paired regions if you have geo-redundant deployments. Contact Azure support through the Azure portal or phone for Severity A incidents.
Set up PinusX Uptime Monitor to check your Azure-hosted endpoints from outside Microsoft's infrastructure. When Azure monitoring tools like Azure Monitor are themselves affected by an outage, external monitoring ensures you still get alerts. PinusX sends email and Slack notifications within 60 seconds of any detected downtime.
Monitor Azure uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.