A global Microsoft Azure outage caused several portals and websites to crash

Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure, which underpins much of the Internet, reported a glitch affecting some of its services. Among those impacted were the websites of Heathrow Airport, NatWest, and Minecraft.

Later Wednesday night, it was reported that the sites were back up and running after experiencing issues during Microsoft’s global outage.

"Between 19:43 UTC and 23:59 UTC on 09 October 2025, customers may have experienced availability issues and failures when loading content for the Azure Portal as well as other management portals across Microsoft," Microsoft explained in a report.

In that regard, the company said that during the incident, approximately 45% of customers using its management portals experienced some level of impact, with the failure rate peaking around 20:54 UTC.

“After that time, customers generally experienced improved availability when attempting to load content. Note that service management via programmatic methods (such as PowerShell or the REST API) and the availability of resources were not impacted,” the company noted.

In addition, media outlets such as BBC Mundo reported that in the United Kingdom, other affected websites included those of supermarket Asda, retailer M&S, and mobile operator O2. In the United States, users reported difficulties accessing the Starbucks and Kroger websites.