Microsoft shuts down Live Updates: Services back after issues in Azure impact Xbox and others

The Azure outage wasn’t the only thing troubling Microsoft recently.

The company is also working on plans to cut about 9,000 jobs in an effort to reduce costs.

Such workforce cuts, which are happening across the tech industry at the same time it is investing heavily in AI, have inspired Representative Ro Khanna, a California lawmaker. proposal of An AI New Deal Jobs Plan.

Here’s a recap of Microsoft’s layoff plans.

According to analysis by Support My Website, a web support firm, the Azure outage could cost Microsoft’s gaming division about $1.2 million per hour.

“This $1.2 million loss per hour is just the loss in Microsoft’s own pockets; it doesn’t even begin to count the massive, undetermined losses for all the other major brands, from airlines to retailers, that were also brought offline,” said Lucas Lopveit, support director of the Support My website. Independent In an email.

Today’s lengthy Azure outage appears to have ended.

A Microsoft dashboard showing the status of the cloud service was reporting no active incidents as of Wednesday evening.

The same portal earlier showed engineers releasing fixes to fix the cloud service, as the outage was troubling travel sites, consumer apps and gaming services.

We have contacted Microsoft for more information.

Throughout the day, despite the Azure outage, Microsoft stock remained relatively flat, with shares falling about one-tenth of a percent.

However, conditions worsened in overnight trading and shares fell about 3.76 percent by Wednesday evening, according to Yahoo! finance.

Just when you thought it was over, the Azure outage may last a little longer than planned.

The company had earlier estimated that a full resolution of the problems on the platform would have taken place about half an hour ago.

Now, it has revised that estimate down, and the company says it will take about 40 more minutes for its technical fixes to take full effect.

The Azure status page reads, “We have revised our mitigation timing and are currently tracking towards full mitigation by 00:40 UTC on October 30, 2025, although we will notify if mitigation is achieved sooner.”

Azure outage may be imminent.

According to crowd-sourced data on Downdetector, users of a variety of applications were reporting very few problems as of Wednesday evening on applications such as Xbox Network, Microsoft 365, Minecraft and Outlook.

The decline in reports may be due to consumers reporting their issues once and then resuming their days, or it may be a sign that the technical fixes Microsoft is detailing to resolve the issue are actually taking effect.

Microsoft says the Azure outage may end soon.

The company suggested in a web post that it hoped its technical fixes would be fully implemented and the problem would subside momentarily.

“We are seeing strong signs of improvement in affected areas and are eyeing full mitigation by 23:20 UTC on October 29, 2025,” the company wrote.

Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud outages in recent days are a warning sign.

According to Munish Walther-Puri, adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and former director of cyber risk at the University of New York, because so many organizations and companies depend on a handful of tech giants for key services like cloud computing, problems within one company quickly spread across the Internet.

“Organizations may think they are insulated from their choice of cloud provider, but the dependencies run deep,” he said. told wired“When key players rely on other hyperscalers, the risks multiply. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these disruptions demonstrate the fragility of our digital backbone.”

Microsoft has released in-depth details on some of the main areas affected by today’s Azure outage.

Here are the products they flagged: App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare API, 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.

Users have also reported problems on Microsoft-affiliated platforms like Xbox Live, Minecraft, and Office 365.

Online crowd-sourcing sites and social media can provide early warnings about cloud outages, but the most reliable way to track the status of platforms like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS is through official company channels.

You can find Azure dashboard Hereand AWS one Here,