A major service outage is affecting Microsoft 365, preventing users from accessing the admin center and other services that rely on Microsoft Entra ID for authentication.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, October 9, 2025, is causing widespread access issues for organizations that depend on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite.
The scope of the impact is broad, affecting any user attempting to access the Microsoft 365 admin center or authenticate through Microsoft Entra ID.
This core dependency means that numerous Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, may be inaccessible to end-users.
Microsoft confirmed it is investigating reports from users who are unable to access these critical services. The initial phase of the investigation involved a review of dependent service pathways to identify the source of the failure and determine the first course of action.
For IT administrators, the inability to access the admin center presents a significant challenge, as it prevents them from managing their environment or troubleshooting user-facing issues.
Microsoft’s investigation has identified an issue within the Azure Front Door (AFD) service as the primary cause of the outage.
This service is responsible for managing and routing traffic to Microsoft’s global web applications, and its malfunction is leading to intermittent access problems for the Microsoft 365 admin portals.
The failure within AFD is believed to be having a cascading effect, contributing to the wider impact on services that use Entra ID.
In response, Microsoft’s engineering teams are reviewing recent changes made to the AFD environment that may have inadvertently triggered the disruption.
The company is analyzing extensive diagnostic data to isolate the exact cause of the issue and understand the mechanics of the failure.
As the investigation progresses, Microsoft’s efforts are now concentrated on the load-balancing infrastructure within its environment.
Load balancers play a critical role in distributing incoming network traffic efficiently across multiple servers, and a fault in this system could explain the intermittent connectivity issues and access failures being reported.
The company has stated that it is actively working on mitigation strategies to resolve the underlying problem and restore service as quickly as possible.
Microsoft has committed to providing an update on the situation on Thursday, October 9, 2025, at 5:30 PM GMT+5:30, as engineers continue to work toward a resolution.
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