Microsoft's Hybrid Cloud Services Hit by Widespread Outage

Microsoft has been dealing with a major outage that is affecting its hybrid cloud services. The issue started on September 30th at 20:30 UTC and has impacted 18 Azure regions, including West US, North Europe, and UK South. The company's ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware Service have all been affected, causing issues with network connectivity and management operations.

The ExpressRoute Gateway connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, while the VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. The Azure VMware Service is designed for building hybrid clouds on VMware, but it's currently experiencing problems. Microsoft has paused its infrastructure servicing activity associated with the event.

The company says that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. However, some network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in certain regions. Microsoft is actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available.