Major Microsoft 365 outage caused by Azure configuration change

Microsoft experienced a major outage in the Central US that began around 6:00 PM EST, affecting Microsoft 365 apps and services (including Teams, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Defender, Intune, PowerBI, Fabric, Windows 365, Viva Engage, Microsoft Purview, and the admin center) and Xbox Live logins. Microsoft attributed the disruption to a buggy Azure backend configuration change that blocked access between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources, causing compute resources to restart; the company mitigated the impact by rerouting traffic to alternate systems and most services were restored, though some users continued to experience issues.