Microsoft Azure outage, 25 January 2023

Azure global WAN routing outage (Microsoft 365 impacted) (25 January 2023). The disruption lasted about 5 hours 35 minutes, according to Microsoft Azure’s own timeline.

What happened. An engineer adding WAN capacity in Madrid ran an unqualified, un-retested procedure containing a command to purge the IGP database. On one vendor’s routers that command executes across all IGP-joined routers, forcing the whole WAN to recompute routes and BGP to re-advertise, causing widespread latency and timeouts.

What changes. Microsoft will audit and block similar high-impact router commands across vendors, publish real-time visibility of device changes, and tighten SOP training and review.

Questions

What caused the Microsoft Azure outage in January 2023?

An engineer adding WAN capacity in Madrid ran an unqualified, un-retested procedure containing a command to purge the IGP database.

Which services were affected?

Azure networking (connectivity to Azure regions), Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Azure Government dependencies.

Read how shared dependencies spread a failure in why one cloud outage can break unrelated apps, or browse the outage archive.