Service Disruptions Impact Microsoft 365 and Amazon Customer Transactions
Microsoft reported a Microsoft 365 service disruption in North America that affected access to multiple services, including the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, limiting administrators’ ability to manage users and view service health/security posture. Microsoft’s investigation, tracked via the Microsoft 365 admin center and service health communications, pointed to a likely Content Delivery Network (CDN) configuration issue as the root cause, with engineers iterating through telemetry review and narrowing the suspected trigger to CDN configuration.
Amazon also experienced a partial outage affecting customer shopping workflows, with widespread user reports of problems loading product pages, using the mobile app, and especially checkout/add-to-cart functionality across major US cities. Amazon acknowledged the disruption publicly and stated it was working to resolve the issue, while the underlying cause was not yet confirmed at the time of reporting.
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How this story unfolded
4 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
Microsoft suspects CDN misconfiguration as root cause
Microsoft said engineers were investigating the incident and reviewing telemetry, with service health communications indicating a Content Delivery Network configuration issue as the likely cause. No definitive list of impacted services or estimated time to resolution had been provided at that stage.
Microsoft 365 outage begins in North America
A Microsoft 365 service disruption began affecting users in North America, impacting access to multiple services. The Microsoft 365 Admin Center was among the affected systems, preventing administrators from managing users and viewing service health and security posture information.
Amazon acknowledges outage and says it is working on a fix
Amazon publicly acknowledged the service issue on Thursday afternoon and said it was working to resolve it. The cause of the partial outage was not known at the time of reporting.
Amazon shopping outage disrupts checkout, carts, and product pages
Amazon experienced a partial service disruption that affected shopping functionality, including checkout, add-to-cart features, product pages, and the mobile app, with impacts reported across multiple major U.S. cities. Downdetector logged more than 150,000 user reports during the incident.
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Microsoft cloud service disruptions affecting Microsoft 365, Exchange Online, and Windows Update/Store
Microsoft reported multiple **service-impacting incidents** across its cloud ecosystem. Administrators in **North America and Canada** experienced an outage and degraded performance in the **Microsoft 365 admin center**, with some users also unable to access the *M365 app* or raise support tickets; Microsoft said it was analyzing telemetry, usage patterns, and **CPU utilization**, and reviewing user-provided **HAR files** to isolate the root cause. Separately, **Exchange Online** quarantined legitimate messages after an updated **URL rule** incorrectly marked some URLs as phishing, disrupting email flow for affected customers while Microsoft worked to release quarantined mail and unblock legitimate URLs. In another disruption, Microsoft attributed **Windows Update** and **Microsoft Store** failures/timeouts (notably impacting Windows 11 users) to a **utility power interruption** at a **West US datacenter**, which cascaded into issues with **Azure storage clusters** supporting content delivery; backup power engaged and power was later stabilized, but service recovery required additional remediation beyond restoring electricity.
Mar 21, 2026
Microsoft 365 and Teams Outages Due to Infrastructure Issues
Microsoft Teams experienced widespread outages, with users across the United States, Europe, and other regions reporting delays in sending messages and problems with other service functions. Microsoft acknowledged the issue publicly, stating that they were investigating the cause and observing signs of recovery, but did not initially provide a root cause or timeline for full restoration. The outage disrupted communication for many organizations relying on Teams for collaboration and messaging. Separately, a significant outage affected Microsoft 365 services—including Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and the Copilot AI assistant—in Japan and China. This disruption was traced to a critical routing misconfiguration in Microsoft's infrastructure, which isolated healthy systems and led to intermittent login failures, degraded performance, and app loading errors. Microsoft confirmed that the incident was not the result of a cyberattack and reported that engineers had rebalanced traffic to restore service, with no data loss or security breaches identified. The outages caused notable business disruption in the affected regions, particularly for organizations dependent on Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem for daily operations.
Mar 21, 2026
Microsoft Azure Outage Caused by Configuration Error
Microsoft Azure and 365 services experienced a significant outage due to an inadvertent configuration change, resulting in widespread latencies, timeouts, and errors for users. The disruption affected a broad range of Azure services, including App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel, Video Indexer, and Virtual Desktop. Microsoft responded by deploying its last known good configuration and began recovering nodes and re-routing traffic through healthy nodes, though some users continued to experience intermittent failures during the recovery process. The outage occurred just hours before Microsoft's quarterly earnings call and followed a similar cloud DNS error that had disrupted AWS users the previous week. Microsoft communicated the incident and recovery status via its Azure Status page, stating that full recovery was expected by the evening. The incident highlights the operational risks associated with cloud infrastructure and the potential for configuration errors to cause widespread service disruptions across critical business applications.
Mar 21, 2026